The English Tenses, Blanché and the Logical Kite

Abstract

There exists a very systematic limitation on natural compositional concept formation in natural language whose full complexity has not been laid bare. The first section of this chapter will revisit the lexical domains of logical constants, where conceptual ‘‘kinship and contrast’’ define a pattern of opposition first represented in the form of a kite in Seuren and Jaspers (2014). Next, I propose a kite analysis for the system of English finite tenses which has a partial precursor in a now-forgotten little article by Robert Blanche on the one hand and in the much more detailed system of binary temporal relations proposed by Vikner (1985) on the other. From the former the kite structure for the finite tenses differs in that it focuses on the inviolability of prior binary divisions for later ones – which is the operation in this realm of progressive universe restriction (PUR) as defined in Seuren and Jaspers (2014) – and on resulting asymmetries in the tense system; from the latter it differs in proposing a system of two pairs of binary oppositions, a temporal pair and an aspectual pair, yielding four binary relations in all (rather than three), with a surprising similarity between the internal architecture of the temporal and the aspectual pair of relations. On the whole, the pattern suggests that basic conceptual oppositions and lexicalization principles are guided by innate linguistic patterns of which binarity, opposition, and asymmetry are the central properties. If correct, the analysis proposed is striking confirmation in yet another semantic domain of the asymmetry approach to the square of opposition and its extensions of our earlier work.