A syntactic model of Tense and Aspect ‒ a case study of English

In this talk, I present a syntactic-based model of Tense and aspect in complementation as well as some adverbial clauses. Since notions such as “Tense” or “(Non-)Finiteness” have proven to be rather difficult to define, I will first separate morphological, syntactic, and semantic uses of these notions. As a consequence, we will see that various mismatches arise, and one aim of this talk is to understand these mismatches. The perspective taken is a syntax-first view where mismatches between form and meaning can naturally be modeled via syntax as a mediator between the interfaces PF and LF.

After briefly laying out syntactic approaches to Tense where Tenses are treated as syntactic arguments, I develop a model for Tense in complementation that i) reflects essential syntactic properties of complement clauses; ii) derives differences between finite and non-finite contexts; and iii) feeds in a streamlined way into the interfaces. The model follows, in spirit, syntactic Tense approaches as in Zagona (1990), Stowell (1996) and Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria (2004), and aligns them with syntactic observations about the structure of complement clauses, in particular the synthesis model presented in Wurmbrand & Lohninger (2023).

The main conclusion reached is that simple notions such as “dependent” vs.”anaphoric” Tense cannot characterize the properties of complement clauses. A detailed syntax of different types of complements, on the other hand, allows us to align the temporal structure with the independently observed general syntactic structure of different complement types and derive the observed temporal properties.