Tense, aspect and coercion in a cross-linguistic perspective

Aspectual operators like the progressive in English change the aspectual nature of the eventuality. The meaning shift is grammaticalized by means of a morphological marker or a syntactic construction. But sometimes aspectual shift is hidden. These are cases where an eventuality description is coerced in order to repair the mismatch between the aspectual nature of the eventuality and the aspectual input requirements of an aspectual operator like the progressive, or a tense operator (like the English Simple Present). Coercion leads to special meaning effects (iteration, habituality, inchoative readings). In this paper we analyze some examples of coercion in English, French and Dutch in the framework developed by de Swart (1998) and de Swart and Molendijk (1999). This framework uses the general set-up of Discourse Representation theory as developed by Kamp and Reyle (1993) to formulate an event-based semantics of tense and aspect, with an ontology of states, processes and events. The examples involve the Progressive, the Perfect and the Simple Present in English, and some comparisons with their counterparts in Dutch and French. The examples will show that there is cross-linguistic variation in what is encoded in aspectual operators, and what is left to coercion. Moreover, we will see that not all possibilities of hidden shift are available in all languages. Thus the general network of aspectual transitions is like a tool box, and languages have a certain amount of freedom to grammaticalize certain transitions in aspectual operators, allow some aspectual transitions as hidden shift, and block others entirely.