A Tense And Aspect Calculus

This paper focuses on a theory of tense and aspect the representation of time in natural language that attempts a formal representation of the relevant lin guistic devices as implication rules in rst order logic It presents a rich ontology as far as verb aspect is concerned distinguishing between complex patterns and vagueness Examples and conclusions are drawn from the com parison between English and Portuguese pinpointing the importance of contrastive studies both for the un derstanding and for the evaluation of a general theory of tense and aspect In the paper we present the actual translations of a wide range of phenomena and a short example