Examines the ways in which time is reflected in natural language - considering tense, aspect, the inherent lexical features of the verb, and various types of temporal adverb.

Wolfgang Klein, formerly professor of German at the Universities of Heidelberg and Frankfurt, is director at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. He is the author of Developing Grammars (1979), with Norbert Dittmar; Second Language Acquisition (1986); and Utterance Structure (1992), with Clive Perdue.

Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 Tense, aspect, and Aktionsart; Chapter 3 Topic time; Chapter 4 Time structure; Chapter 5 Inherent temporal features of the lexical content; Chapter 6 Aspect; Chapter 7 Tense; Chapter 8 Temporal adverbials and their meaning; Chapter 9 The function of positional adverbials in the utterance; Chapter 10 Adverbials of duration and of frequency; Chapter 11 Non-declarative clauses, subordinate clauses, noun phrases;