The Expression of Time

Human though and action is fundamentally shaped by a small set of cognitive categories, such as time, space, causality, or possession. It is not surprising, therefore, that all natural languages have developed many devices to express these categories. Temporality, for example, is reflected in the lexical meaning of verbs, in grammatical marking of tense and aspect, in time adverbials, in special particles, and in the application of discourse principles. Many of these devices have been the subject of intensive research across languages; but as a rule, this research focuses on particular aspects, it the does not took at the expression of such a category as a whole. Precisely this is the aim of the present series. The short volumes will bring together what is known about the expression of a particular category in human language.

The Series The Expresessiosn of Cognitive categories is edited by Wolfgang Klein and Stephen Levinson, Max-Planck-Insitute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen (The Netherlands).

This book is intended as a turorial for the study of how time is expressed in natural languages. Its chapters take the reader through number of foundational issues, such as the various notions of time and the various means to express it; other chapters are devoted to more specific questions, such as the acquisition of time, its modelling in formal semantics and in computational linguistics, or how its expression can be empirically investigated.