In this book, Kit Fine draws together a series of essays, three of them previously unpublished, on possibility, necessity, and tense.

Here is a unique work of reference. Not only does it unite studies which explore the syntax and semantics of tense or modality, but it is the first book of its kind to embrace the interaction of tense and modality within a coherent generative model.

Syntax – the study of sentence structure – has been at the centre of generative linguistics from its inception and has developed rapidly and in various directions. The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax provides a historical context for what is happening in the field of generative syntax today, a survey of the various generative approaches to syntactic structure available in the literature and an overview of the state of the art in the principal modules of the theory and the interfaces with semantics, phonology, information structure and sentence processing, as well as linguistic variation and language acquisition. This indispensable resource for advanced students, professional linguists (generative and non-generative alike) and scholars in related fields of inquiry presents a comprehensive survey of the field of generative syntactic research in all its variety, written by leading experts and providing a proper sense of the range of syntactic theories calling themselves generative.

After an introductory chapter that provides an overview to theoretical issues in tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality, this volume presents a variety of original contributions that are firmly empirically-grounded based on elicited or corpus data, while adopting different theoretical frameworks. Thus, some chapters rely on large diachronic corpora and provide new qualitative insight on the evolution of TAM systems through quantitative methods, while others carry out a collostructional analysis of past-tensed verbs using inferential statistics to explore the lexical grammar of verbs. A common goal is to uncover semantic regularities and variation in the TAM systems of the languages under study by taking a close look at context. Such a fine-grained approach contributes to our understanding of the TAM systems from a typological perspective. The focus on well-known Indo-European languages (e.g. French, German, English, Spanish) and also on less commonly studied languages (e.g. Hungarian, Estonian, Avar, Andi, Tagalog) provides a valuable cross-linguistic perspective.

The only book to investigate the parallel between what happens at other times and what happens in other possible worlds.

Joan Bybee and her colleagues present a new theory of the evolution of grammar that links structure and meaning in a way that directly challenges most contemporary versions of generative grammar. This study focuses on the use and meaning of grammatical markers of tense, aspect, and modality and identifies a universal set of grammatical categories. The authors demonstrate that the semantic content of these categories evolves gradually and that this process of evolution is strikingly similar across unrelated languages. Through a survey of seventy-six languages in twenty-five different phyla, the authors show that the same paths of change occur universally and that movement along these paths is in one direction only. This analysis reveals that lexical substance evolves into grammatical substance through various mechanisms of change, such as metaphorical extension and the conventionalization of implicature. Grammaticization is always accompanied by an increase in frequency of the grammatical marker, providing clear evidence that language use is a major factor in the evolution of synchronic language states. The Evolution of Grammar has important implications for the development of language and for the study of cognitive processes in general.

This volume addresses problems of semantics regarding the analysis of tense and aspect (TA) markers in a variety of languages, including Arabic, Croatian, English, French, German, Russian, Thai, and Turkish. Its main interest goes out to epistemic uses of such markers, whereby epistemic modality is understood as indicating “a degree of compatibility between the modal world and the factual world” (Declerck). All contributions, moreover, tackle these problems from a more or less cognitive point of view, with some of them insisting on the need to provide a unifying explanation for all usage types, temporal and non-temporal, and all of them accepting the premise that the semantics of TA categories essentially refers to subjective, rather than objective, concerns. The volume also represents one of the first attempts to gather accounts of TA marking (in various languages) that are explicitly set within the framework of Cognitive Grammar. Ultimately, this volume aims to contribute to establishing an awareness that modal meaning elements are directly relevant to the analysis of the grammar of time.