Aspectual Grammar and Past Time Reference

This work examines the linguistic constructions which speakers use to talk about events that occurred in the past and states which held in the past. Laura Michaelis argues that the fundamental conceptual division between events and states forms the basis of systems of verbal aspect in all languages, and that one cannot talk about the meaning of a past-tense assertion without making reference to the event-state distinction. Focusing on English data, the author examines the semantic and functional overlap between assertions about the past and assertions involving events: when one asserts that an event of a given kind exists, one is making an assertion about the past.

 [url=http://][/url]When Truth Gives Out will be of interest not only to philosophers who work on language, ethics, knowledge, or logic, but to any thoughtful person who has wondered what it is, or isn't, for something to be true.