Introduction

Time is an intellectual construct necessary to conceive of and to comprehend changes in the world around us. Grammatical notions of time are manifestations of the human experience of time, traditionally characterized in terms of tense, aspect, and taxis. Tense frames time linearly as a past–present–future continuum and establishes the relationship between the time of the depicted situation and the moment of speech. Aspect is defined as the assessment or characterization of the denoted situation “as it progresses or as it is distributed in time, but irrespective of the moment of speech or … of the time of another action, mentioned or implied” (Maslov 1988: 63). Taxis, which is less common than tense and aspect, is concerned with the chronological relationship between two situations: i.e. do they occur simultaneously; does one take precedence; is there a perceived sequentiality?

In the modern world, people consider tense to be indispensable for an understanding of reality. Nonetheless, a tense system is not an ontological necessity. Historically, aspect is primary, and tense secondary in Indo-European languages (Kurylowicz 1964; Bybee 1985), and creole languages are inherently aspectual (Givón 1982; Kotsinas 1989). For pre-modern people, more salient than tense per se was whether or not a certain change had occurred and whether or not the speaker could ascertain its occurrence with confidence. If the speaker was certain, the hearer would naturally interpret the change to have occurred in the past. Tense has thus emerged as secondary. Tense is abstract, intellectual, and objective; aspect, on the other hand, is definite, impressionistic, and subjective (Izui 1967: 85), involving not only the temporal contour of a situation, but a number of other factors that are not strictly temporal (Michaelis 1993: 17), e.g. modality and evidentiality (Chapter 24), resultativity (Section 9.7), transitivity (Section 7.4), and distribution of focus over sentential constituents (Section 8.9). Ancient Japanese people conceived of time quite differently than their modern Japanese counterparts as evidenced by the fact that the word toki ‘time’ in classical Japanese meant a moment or occasion appropriate to starting a certain action (Wada 1994), e.g. toki no koe [Lit. voice of the time] meaning ‘a battle cry’.