Ebook: Tense and Aspect in English

DYANA, 1990. — 40 p.Dynamic Interpretation of Natural Language.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the progressive and the perfect in English, and to provide a framework which accounts for the semantics of these two constructions. In order to reach this goal, we should isolate each aspectual form and consider its semantic contribution. However, it is also important to realize that the progressive and the perfect can cooccur in a single clause. Thus, one of the desiderata for a semantic analysis of these two constructions is that it correctly predicts the interaction of the two constructions. We consider the progressive first, and the perfect later.