Some effects of aspect on tense construal

This article presents an approach to tense construal that assumes that Times are arguments of TP, and proposes an account of how Times are represented in the syntax without there being lexical items that refer to them. It is argued that VP material is copied into positions that are construed as temporal argument positions. The 'copy' approach to Reference time and Speechtime is argued to account for the influences of VP and DP features on temporal ordering. The 'copy' approach also makes available a new analysis of the relationship between Event time (E) and Reference time (R). That relationship has most often been characterized as either a finite tense-ordering relation or an aspectual relation. It is argued here that when R and E are not coreferential the relation between them is one of temporal partitivity. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.