More Structural Analogies Between Pronouns and Tenses

This paper is as much about tenses and viewpoint aspects as it is about pronouns. The proposal about pronouns is taken up and elaborated in much more detail in my LI article Making a Pronoun. In drawing analogies between pronouns and tenses, the paper also spells out the relation between viewpoint aspect and tense. Viewpoint aspects divide up the extended verbal projection into regions: the lowest verbal projections denote properties of events (eventualities). Adverbs and functional heads in this region place conditions on the events (eventualities) described by the verb (see my Event Argument). Viewpoint aspects map properties of events to properties of times. They thus create a region where functional heads and adverbs place conditions on the \u27viewing time\u27 or \u27topic time\u27 with respect to which the event described in the lower region is placed