Tense and aspect in informal Welsh / by Bob Morris Jones.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jones, Bob Morris.

Series:

Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs ; 223.

Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs, 1864-4302 ; 223

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Welsh language--Verb.

Welsh language.

Welsh language--Discourse analysis.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xxii, 389 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berlin ; New York : De Gruyter, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The book provides a descriptive account of the semantics of three grammatical areas in informal Welsh: inflections of finite verbs, perfect aspect, and progressive aspect. The analyses distinguish context-independent primary meanings from other meanings which are due to implications and contextual effects. The inflections convey factuality, tense, (morphological) aspect, and habituality, but the inflections and their meanings are differently distributed over different sorts of verbs. The analysis of factuality outlines different sorts of counterfactual situations, and discusses whether counterfactual meaning can best be accounted for in terms of true statements in imagined possible worlds or in terms of false statements in the actual world. The analysis of tense argues that it conveys evaluation time and not situation time, which can be different to evaluation time, and that tense is not a collection of simple labels like 'past' or 'present' but is a combination of two times, a deictic reference time and a relative evaluation time, which organize the tenses as a system. Morphological aspect is discussed in terms of perfective and imperfective meanings. Habituality is a property of situations which can be described by all inflections but the study shows that bod 'be' alone has specialized forms to convey habituality. The discussion of the perfect aspect considers the appropriateness of anterior time, retrospective view, and current relevance to account for its meaning. The author argues that the progressive aspect conveys a durative view and the non-progressive a non-durative view, and shows that the progressive can describe situations which are described by the non-progressive in other languages. The study also considers whether other expressions can be aspect markers. The book shows that the primary meanings of the three grammatical areas are subject to various constraints.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Conventions

Tables

Figures

Chapter 1. The data: Finite verbs and aspect

Chapter 2. Finite inflections of bod 'be'

Chapter 3. Finite inflections of lexical and modal verbs

Chapter 4. Perfective and imperfective aspect

Chapter 5. The inflectional system

Chapter 6. Other semantic analyses of finite verb inflections

Chapter 7. Perfect aspect

Chapter 8. Progressive aspect

Chapter 9. More about aspect

Chapter 10. Closing remarks

Backmatter

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612784101

9781282784109

1282784102

9783111742724

3111742725

9783110227970

3110227975

OCLC:

665839406