Time in Language

This book looks at the various ways in which time is reflected in natural language. All natural languages have developed a rich repetoire of devices to express time, but linguists have tended to concentrate on tense and aspect, rather than discourse principles. Klein considers the four main ways in which language expresses time - the verbal categories of tense and aspect; inherent lexical features of the verb; and various types of temporal adverbs. Klein looks at the interaction of these four devices and suggests new or partly new treatments of these devices to express temporality.

Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 Tense, aspect, and Aktionsart; Chapter 3 Topic time; Chapter 4 Time structure; Chapter 5 Inherent temporal features of the lexical content; Chapter 6 Aspect; Chapter 7 Tense; Chapter 8 Temporal adverbials and their meaning; Chapter 9 The function of positional adverbials in the utterance; Chapter 10 Adverbials of duration and of frequency; Chapter 11 Non-declarative clauses, subordinate clauses, noun phrases;

Wolfgang Klein, formerly professor of German at the Universities of Heidelberg and Frankfurt, is director at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. He is the author of Developing Grammars (1979), with Norbert Dittmar; Second Language Acquisition (1986); and Utterance Structure (1992), with Clive Perdue.

Examines the ways in which time is reflected in natural language - considering tense, aspect, the inherent lexical features of the verb, and various types of temporal adverb.