This comprehensive examination of tense and grammatical aspect provides fascinating insight into how languages indicate distinctions of time. Providing an in-depth survey of the scholarship from the ancient Greeks through the 1980s, Time and the Verb explains and evaluates every major issue and theory, concentrating on familiar Classical and modern European languages. An invaluable reference tool as well as a major contribution to the history of linguistic sciences, this book will be the standard against which future work on tense and aspect is measured.

Robert I. Binnick's profile page

Robert I. Binnick is a Professor of Linguistics at Scarborough College, University of Toronto.

"An important contribution to linguistics....[Binnick's] scholarship is breathtakingly compendious...but never gratuitous.... accessible and useful to both scholars and laypersons....anyone interested in tense, aspect, or time studies generally MUST read and reread this book. It sums up, and now defines, the discipline. But Time and the Verb will also be of benefit beyond this discipline. Syntax, morphology, and semantics are all so well served...that no one working in those areas, indeed no linguist, and no one interested in either language or time, could fail to be enriched by it."--Word

"Most welcome since it provides the reader with a comprehensive perspective, both diachronically and synchronically, into this very complicated area....It gives the reader a tremendous amount of impressive data that are fully analyzed, explained and evaluated....There is no question that Time and the Verb is one of the most important books to have appeared on tense and aspect. No future linguist will be able to ignore the book if he or she is interested in tense and aspect at all. In this sense, the contribution Binnick has made is enormous."--Canadian Journal of Linguistics

"Binnick's is the only work with which I am familiar that provides the reader (whether student or advanced scholar) with so broad and deep a perspective. The range covered is impressive: from classical Greek and Latin grammar through to the latest proposals in formal semantics."--Bernard Comrie, author of The World's Major Languages

"This is a work of great value."--Language