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Temporality: Universals and Variation

ISBN: 978-1-118-58403-3

April 2014

Wiley-Blackwell

352 pages

Description

Temporality surveys the ways in which languages of different types refer to past, present, and future events, through an in-depth examination of four major language types: tense-based English, tense-aspect-based Polish, aspect-based Chinese, and mood-based Kalaallisut.

  • Cutting-edge research on directly compositional dynamic semantics of languages with and without grammatical tense
  • New in-depth analysis of temporal, aspectual, modal, as well as nominal discourse reference
  • Presents a novel logical language for representing linguistic meaning (Update with Centering)
  • Develops a unified theory of tense, aspect, mood, and person as different types of ‘grammatical centering systems’
About the Author

Maria Bittner is a Professor of Linguistics at Rutgers University and a member of the editorial boards of Journal of Semantics and Semantics & Pragmatics. She is well known for her work on cross-linguistic formal semantics, dynamic semantics, and syntax-semantics interface, with special focus on Kalaallisut (Eskimo-Aleut: Greenland). Her early research in LF-based static semantics culminated in Case, Scope, and Binding (1994).