Punctual Versus Durative as Covert Categories 1

The inherent meaning of punctualness or durativeness found in many English verbs, can best be studied in the framework of Whorf's theory of Grammatical Categories. When co‐occurrence restrictions attributable to other features such as activity or nonactivity are set aside, it is clear that we must posit at least these two aspectual features, punctual and durative, to account for the way verbs and longer verbal expressions are used with time adverbs such as “already” and with the tense signs and auxiliaries. For example, punctual verbs in the present tense form express a future meaning after “hope” as in “I hope he says something”, whereas durative verbs refer to present time, as in “I hope he knows”. Comparable reactances are found after “wish”, “like”, and “would like”. Whether semantic or syntatic, these restrictions can be described in terms of either lexical features or covert categories, but not in a mathematically rigorous way

Covert · Linguistics · Meaning (existential) · Past tense · Present tense · Set (abstract data type) · Verb · Computer Science · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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