The Logic of Aspect: An Axiomatic Approach

by Antony Galton

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

ISBN 0-19-824430-4

Origin

This book originated as the author's Ph.D. thesis (University of Leeds, 1981), although it differs substantially from the thesis in many respects. The original thesis was entitled The Logic of Aspect: An Inquiry into the Semantic Structure of Ordinary Temporal Discourse

The blurb on the dust-jacket

Recent work on the logic of tense and aspect has been concentrated, for the most part, on a model-theoretic approach. On this approach, the axiomatic method used by Prior in his pioneering work on Tense Logic has been largely ignored. In this book, the author takes a Prior-style axiomatization of Tense Logic as his starting-point, and shows how it can be extended to incorporate aspectual notions. The system thus derived is called Event Logic. It differs from other formal treatments of aspect in that it incorporates the distinction between perfective and imperfective aspect into the heart of its formalism; in particular, it recognizes that the bearer of perfective aspect and the bearer of imperfective aspect must be assigned to different logical categories. Once this formal system is established, it provides a framework for a subsequent discussion of the niceties of aspect, in particular of the progrssive, which is here regarded as the most problematic aspectual category. A variety of philosophical considerations involving such matters as cause, intention, and possibility, are brought to bear on this examination.

Review

Johan van Benthem in The Philosophical Review, Volume 95, Number 3, July 1986.

Later developments

Subsequently a model-theoretic semantics was given for Event Logic. This was published as 'The Logic of Occurrence', in Antony Galton (editor), Temporal Logics and their Applications, Academic Press 1987.