21 - Temporality

Abstract

In thinking about the logical and computational semantics of temporal categories in natural languages, issues of temporal ontology, or metaphysics, must be distinguished from issues of temporal relation. The first thing to observe about the temporal ontology implicit in natural languages is that it is not purely temporal. To take a simple example, the English perfect, when predicated of an event like losing a watch, says that some contextually retrievable consequences of the event in question hold at the time under discussion. Thus, conjoining such a perfect with a further clause denying those consequences is infelicitous. The claim that the semantics depends directly on the conceptual representation of action and contingency suggests that this semantics might be universal, despite considerable differences in its syntactic and morphological encoding across languages. The work described in this chapter suggests that such differences across languages are superficial. Ironically, the English tense/aspect system seems to be based on semantic primitives remarkably like those, which Whorf ascribed to Hopi. Matters of temporal sequence and temporal locality seem to be quite secondary to matters of perspective and contingency. This observation in turn suggests that the semantics of tense and aspect is profoundly shaped by concerns with goals, actions, and consequences, and that temporality in the narrow sense of the term is merely one facet of this system among many.