Verbal Aspect in Discourse

Book excerpt: In the light of growing insights into the universal temporal-semantic nature of aspectual distinctions, today's aspectology has broadened its attention from restrictedly event-defining functions of aspect on the sentence level towards its primary perspectival functions on the discourse/situation level. Hereby it attempts to relate these functions to each other in ways that stimulate consistently language processing on a more solid perceptual-conceptual and pragmatic basis. Reflecting in various ways this general tendency. The 13 papers collected in this volume are oriented to four fields of research: (1) Developmental properties of aspect and tense; (2) Ideo-pragmatic and conceptual-semantic correlates of aspect and the perspectival organisation of discourse; (3) Aspect, case and discourse; (4) and Aspect in literary discourse. The editor's Introduction gives a comprehensive survey of contemporary aspectology and its development towards a proper integration of discourse/situation conditions. Besides cross-linguistic considerations (including English), the languages analyzed specifically are Russian, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, French and Finnish.