"Tempus fugit". El aspecto como significado primario de los tiempos verbales

Abstract

This work investigates into the semantics of tense and challenges the traditional view oftense being a grammatical category primarily encoding temporal deixis. Instead, it is proposed thattense expresses a blend of aspect, evidentiality and modality, while temporal deixis is claimed to be to agreat extent an inference drawn on these. A model for describing grammatical aspect is outlined, whichemphasises on the natural boundaries of events, namely their beginning and their end. According tothis, an event can be characterized as [±completed] and/or [±begun]. This model also naturally accountsfor the “non canonical” uses of tense, as when the past tense is used to describe present or future events,etc. The article focuses on River-Plate Spanish.