Publisher's Synopsis
The articles collected in this book provide thorough analyses of tense semantics and discuss descriptive, methodological and theoretical issues connected with tense semantics. The articles highlight the relation between tense meaning and tense function in texts against the background of general principles of text and discourse organization. The general idea underlying the articles is that languages contain direct meaning-form associations, and the formal and substantive analytical approaches adopted are formulated on this basis. The reader will find in-depth analyses of tense semantics in a number of languages: Dutch, English, French, German, Classical Greek, Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, and Swahili.
