A Syntactic-Semantic Model of Aspectual and Temporal Interpretation. The view from Romanian

The goal of this presentation is to analyse aspectuality and temporality in Romanian complex clauses on the basis of my own corpus. I examine perfective and imperfective aspect in order to illustrate the relative nature of aspect and tense through event labelling. One of the main research questions is whether aspectual and temporal relations in complex clauses can be defined in terms of dependency vs. independence by means of event labels. More narrowly, event labelling serves as a tool for defining or measuring the aspectual or temporal axis of the events. A second major question concerns the values of tenses such as the Romanian simple present, the compound past, and the conditional, and the extent to which their basic temporal interpretations may be affected, extended, or reduced by the presence of other events. The theoretical framework includes: Vendler (1967), Dowty (1979), Davidson (1967), Hornstein (1993), Reichenbach (1947), among others.  In addition to these established frameworks, I introduce several terms of my own. The first is the hidden event variable, an abstract notion similar to Davidson’s event variable, used to explain aspectual and temporal relations inside complex clauses. Building on this, I adapt Newton’s First Law of inertia to linguistic aspectuality and temporality, illustrating how one event (x) may influence the aspectual or temporal value of another (y). Its counterpart is the rewrite condition. I also distinguish several types of aspectual expressions: internal, external, local, and distant.