Review article Tense, aspect, and syntax1 PIER MARCO BERTINETTO and VALENTINA BIANCHI Alessandra Giorgi and Fabio Pianesi: Tense and Aspect: From Semantics to Morphosyntax. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Abstract This review is devoted to the bulk of Giorgi and Pianesi’s (1997) proposal for the (morpho-)syntax and semantics of tense and aspect, presented in chapters 1–4 of their book. The authors investigate the cross-linguistic vari- ation in the semantics of various tense forms (Present, Imperfect, Present Perfect) and claim that it can be directly linked to their morphosyntactic properties, expressed in terms of an explicit theory of functional features and projections. In our critical discussion we contend that (a) the treatment of aspect is deficient (in particular, we criticize the unified analysis of the different usages of the Italian Present Perfect); (b) the treatment of actionality — that is, Aktionsart — phenomena is occasionally misconceived; (c) the syntactic treatment of the ‘‘P-definiteness constraint’’ (Klein 1992) presents some technical problems. On these grounds, we put forward two more general remarks. The first one concerns the assumption that there is a strict correspondence between the morphological exponence of specific inflectional features and tense– aspect semantics. We believe instead that the three levels of semantics, syntax, and morphology must be assumed to be partially independent, although related in a nonarbitrary way. Second, we suggest that G&P have failed to take into account the discourse function of tenses. Although a formal syntactic analysis of tense and aspect is obviously relevant, tense and aspect are intrinsically ‘‘interface phenomena,’’ where the syntactic config- urations yielded by the computational system crucially interact with the independent constraints of other external systems. Linguistics 41–3 (2003), 565–606 0024–3949/03/0041–0565 © Walter de Gruyter Brought to you by | Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa Authenticated Download Date | 10/15/19 11:26 PM