This is nowhere more true than in the study of aspect. Syntactic theory on aspect certainly benefits from an understanding of aspectual semantics; one can hardly study the syntax of aspect without doing enough semantics to characterize the aspectual distinctions that one seeks to explain. Thus the meanings presented in Reichenbach’s (1947) theory of tense (including the English perfect) are relevant for syntactic hypotheses. Reichenbach proposed that three times are referred to in every sentence: the Speech Time (ST), a Reference Time (RT) and an Event Time (ET). In his notation, a comma indicate...
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