Original essays by philosophers of language and philosophers of time exploring the semantics and metaphysics of tense.

This guide provides the reader with a broad perspective of grammar, from classical Greek and Latin to the latest proposals in formal semantics.

A new approach to linguistic meaning and grammatical constructions based on simple geometric principles.

Formal semantics - the scientific study of meaning in natural language - is one of the most fundamental and long-established areas of linguistics. This Handbook offers a comprehensive, yet compact guide to the field, bringing together research from a wide range of world-leading experts. Chapters include coverage of the historical context and foundation of contemporary formal semantics, a survey of the variety of formal/logical approaches to linguistic meaning and an overview of the major areas of research within current semantic theory, broadly conceived. The Handbook also explores the interfaces between semantics and neighbouring disciplines, including research in cognition and computation. This work will be essential reading for students and researchers working in linguistics, philosophy, psychology and computer science.

Over the past few decades, the book series Linguistische Arbeiten [Linguistic Studies], comprising over 500 volumes, has made a significant contribution to the development of linguistic theory both in Germany and internationally. The series will continue to deliver new impulses for research and maintain the central insight of linguistics that progress can only be made in acquiring new knowledge about human languages both synchronically and diachronically by closely combining empirical and theoretical analyses. To this end, we invite submission of high-quality linguistic studies from all the central areas of general linguistics and the linguistics of individual languages which address topical questions, discuss new data and advance the development of linguistic theory.

The Grammar of the English Tense System forms the first volume of a four-volume set, The Grammar of the English Verb Phrase. The other volumes, to appear over the next few years, will deal with mood and modality, aspect and voice. The book aims to provide a grammar of tense which can be used both as an advanced reference grammar (for example by MA-level or postgraduate students of English or linguistics) and as a scientific study which can act as a basis for and stimulus to further research. It provides not only a wealth of data but also a unique framework for the study of the English tense system, which achieves great predictive and explanatory power on the basis of a limited number of relatively simple rules. The framework provided allows for an analysis of the semantics of individual tenses which reflects the role of tenses not only in locating situations in time relative to speech time but also in relating situations in time relative to one another to form temporally coherent discourse. Attention is paid to the relations between tenses. On the one hand, we can identify sets of tenses linked to particular temporal areas such as the past or the future. These sets of tenses provide for the expression of a system of temporal relations in a stretch of discourse in which all the situations are located within the same temporal area. On the other hand, there are many contexts in which speakers might in theory choose between two or more tenses to locate a situation (e.g., when we choose between the past tense and the present perfect to locate a situation before speech time), and the book examines the difference that a choice of one or the other tense may make within a discourse context. The book moves from a detailed exploration of the meaning and use of individual tenses to a thorough analysis of the way in which tenses can be seen to function together as sets, and finally to a detailed examination of tenses in, and tenses interacting with, temporal adverbials. Original data is used frequently throughout the book to illustrate the theory discussed.

Bernard Comrie introduces readers to the range of variation found in tense systems across the languages of the world.