Tense and aspect in informal welsh

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This book offers a detailed exploration of the semantics of three grammatical areas in informal Welsh: inflections of finite verbs, perfect aspect, and progressive aspect. It differentiates between context-independent primary meanings and those arising from implications and contextual effects. The inflections express factuality, tense, (morphological) aspect, and habituality, with varying distributions across different verb types. The analysis of factuality examines counterfactual situations, debating whether such meanings are best understood through true statements in imagined worlds or false statements in reality. In discussing tense, the author argues it represents evaluation time rather than situation time, emphasizing that tense is a complex system involving a deictic reference time and a relative evaluation time, rather than mere labels like 'past' or 'present.' Morphological aspect is addressed through perfective and imperfective meanings, while habituality, which can be expressed by all inflections, is uniquely conveyed by specialized forms of bod 'be.' The perfect aspect is analyzed concerning anterior time, retrospective view, and current relevance. The progressive aspect is shown to convey a durative view, contrasting with the non-progressive's non-durative perspective, and the study explores whether other expressions can serve as aspect markers. Ultimately, it reveals that the primary meanings within these grammati