Time and the Verb A Guide to Tense and Aspect [Hardcover]

This comprehensive examination of tense and grammatical aspect provides fascinating insight into how languages indicate distinctions of time. Providing an in-depth survey of the scholarship from the ancient Greeks through the 1980s,Time and the Verbexplains and evaluates every major issue and theory, concentrating on familiar Classical and modern European languages. An invaluable reference tool as well as a major contribution to the history of linguistic sciences, this book will be the standard against which future work on tense and aspect is measured.

Binnick's is the only work with which I am familiar that provides the reader (whether student or advanced scholar) with so broad and deep a perspective. The range covered is impressive: from classical Greek and Latin grammar through to the latest proposals in formal semantics. --Bernard Comrie, author ofThe World's Major Languages

Most welcome since it provides the reader with a comprehensive perspective, both diachronically and synchronically, into this very complicated area....It gives the reader a tremendous amount of impressive data that are fully analyzed, explained and evaluated....There is no question thatTime andthe Verbis one of the most important books to have appeared on tense and aspect. No future linguist will be able to ignore the book if he or she is interested in tense and aspect at all. In this sense, the contribution Binnick has made is enormous. --Canadian Journal of Linguistics

An important contribution to linguistics....[Binnick's] scholarship is breathtakingly compendious...but never gratuitous.... accessible and useful to both scholars and laypersons....anyone interested in tense, aspect, or time studies generally MUST read and reread this book. It sums up, and now defines, the discipline. ButTime and the Verbwill also be of benefit beyond this discipline. Syntax, morphology, and semantics are all so well served.l£(