영어의 시제와 상의 의미 연구

Tense and Aspect in English

This paper is to allow for a unified analysis of tense, and aspect, not committed to a particular theoretical framework but to a comprehensive descriptive syntax. Aspect and tense are both concerned with temporal reference, and considering that tense sometimes may imply aspectual meaning, it is difficult to distinguish between tense and aspect. The English aspect, however, deserves an independent grammatical category as it has syntactic devices to express various aspectual meanings related to non-dietic time in aspect. Aspectual meanings vary according to the distinction of count terms and mass terms, the interaction of the event quantification with the argument quantification like the subject and object, and the interaction of the event quantification with the adjunctive quantification. Therefore, to describe the tense and aspect, we should consider not the verb alone but the relations between the other grammatical categories, including subject, object, and ever adverb. Relevant contexts can reveal the relevant situations which tense and aspect represent.