This dissertations explores the semantics and pragmatics of tense and aspect
constructions in three groups of languages: I. English; II. French, Italian, German;
III. Mandarin Chinese.
The basic claims of this dissertation are: (i) the English past tense is lexically
ambiguous between an anaphoric and a uniqueness reading; (ii) the different
properties of the present perfect construction in English versus French, Italian and
German follow from the competition between the present perfect with the alternative
past tense and the different set of alternatives available in these languages;
(iii) the distribution of the Mandarin Chinese perfective particles reflects asymmetry
in their presuppositions, such as anaphoricity and anti-resultativeness; (iv)
Mandarin Chinese differs from the languages in group I and II in that it establishes
anaphoric dependency in the domain of eventualities, not times; (v) the crosslinguistic
distribution of perfect-like tense-aspectual constructions follows from similar
semantic-pragmatic strategies, namely the competition between alternatives
from a set of general categories (anaphoric, unique, neutral, and antiresulative).