next up previous
Next: Only in Hindi Up: The Extraordinary GLOW at Previous: Crosslinguistic Variability of Laws

Aspect and Event Structure in Vedic

Paul Kiparsky, Stanford University

The Vedic tense-aspect system can be accounted for, and its tense categories identified with those known from other languages, if we make two refinements of the basic Reichenbachian approach. The first is to specify, as part of the representation of certain tense/aspect categories, a particular mapping of the verbal predicate's event structure into the parameters that define their temporal relations. The second is to adopt from morphological theory the principle that general categories are blocked by specific categories. This approach solves some classic problems of the English tense/aspect system as well, including tense shift in subordinate clauses and the ``present perfect puzzle''.



Rajesh Bhatt
Mon Mar 30 11:24:59 EST 1998