The Present Perfective Paradox across Languages

Astrid De Wit holds a Ph.D in linguistics from the University of Antwerp (2014). She spent a year as a visiting scholar at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles under a grant from the National Fund for Scientific Research. She has published widely on tense, aspect, and modality in a variety of languages, and her work has appeared in journals such as Journal of Linguistics, Studies in Language, and Journal of Germanic Linguistics.

• General preface List of glosses 1: Introduction 2: An epistemic approach to the categories of tense and aspect 3: The present perfective paradox: The state of the art 4: The present perfective paradox in English 5: The present perfective paradox in French 6: The present perfective paradox in Sranan 7: The present perfective paradox in Slavic 8: Conclusion and wider relevance References Index

De Wit has managed to something remarkable,which is to construct a comparative analysis of an underexamined issue of tense and aspect that has typological promiseA great merit of this study is that the analysis manages to take each language (family) on its own terms, instead of focusing on subsets of the relevant data and reductivist generalizations...With regard to its theoretical potential, her development of a cognitive-linguistic epistemic approach to aspectual semantics is a welcome departure from the traditional approach of relying almost entirely on configurations on the timeline