Thinking and speaking about time is ridden with puzzles and paradoxes. How do human beings conceptualize time? Why, for example, does the availability of tense vary in different languages? How do the lines of information from tense, aspect, temporal adverbs, and context interact in the mind? Does time describe events? If real time does not flow, where do the concepts of the past, present and future come from? Are they basic concepts or are they composed out of more primitive constituents? And, finally, what is the semantics of expressions with temporal reference? This book offers a new...

Thinking and speaking about time is ridden with puzzles and paradoxes. How do human beings conceptualize time? Why, for example, does the availability of tense vary in different languages? How do the lines of information from tense, aspect, temporal adverbs, and context interact in the mind? Does time describe events? If real time does not flow, where do the concepts of the past, present and future come from? Are they basic concepts or are they composed out of more primitive constituents? And, finally, what is the semantics of expressions with temporal reference? This book offers a new...