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In the interplay of aspect and quantity in the Finnish system of object-marking the opposition between the partitive object and the (morphologically heterogeneous) total object plays a central role. The received view holds that the partitive object indicates incompleteness of the event in one way or another: it is used if the event does not take place at all (negation); if the aspect is unbounded; or if the quantity of the object referent is open (unbounded). The total object is used in affirmative sentences that indicate bounded aspect together with a closed quantity affected in full. Recent grammars have crystallized the three conditions of the partitive into a hierarchy of decreasing strength: negation > aspect > quantity: negation triggers the partitive irrespective of both aspect and quantity, and unbounded aspect triggers it irrespective of quantity. The article elaborates the hierarchy and argues that the aspectual function of the partitive is in fact not monolithic but consists of three different sub functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information about the book "Aspect," by Bernard Comrie. the Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics series. This book has been quite influential as a standard reference work. The book consists of five chapters. The first chapter is called "some theoretical and methodological preliminaries." Here, Comrie discusses the relation between tense and the general concept of time and the status of notions such as grammaticalization, deixis, basic and secondary meanings and implicature. In the final section of Chapter one, Comrie discusses critically the thesis that tense and aspect categories should be defined primarily in terms of their contextual functions. In the book, Comrie notes that pure relative tense at least in English appears to be a phenomenon pertaining to subordinate verbs. According to the book, Classical Arabic, like many other languages in the world, does not systematically distinguish present and past time reference in imperfective contexts, in particular in those cases when the time reference is made clear in some other way.

This article suggests a spatial topological model for tense, aspect, and mood. The model is first developed for Persian, followed by an initial discussion. The model is then applied to French, Russian, Arabic, and Turkish, showing that the model does allow for the simultaneous mapping of their tense, aspect, and mood systems. In the final part, it is argued that the model may be more than a convenient descriptive device, providing a synoptic view of entire systems, for those familiar with three-dimensional diagrams. It provides a means which allows for the reinterpretation of assumptions about the interrelationship and the differentiations of the categories involved.