Tense and aspect in truth-conditional semantics

This article shows in simplest possible terms how the standard truth-conditional semantic framework deals with basic data involving various tense and aspect forms in English. Although I only discuss English examples, the idea is that the overall approach can be applied to any language. I start with a provisional definition of the terms “tense” and “aspect” and some basic terms to be used in the article. I then discuss some differences between an artificial logical language such as tense logic and natural language, but also point out that the former does have lot of contribute to our understanding of natural language tense systems. The next four sections show how the standard formal semantic system, which is a sophisticated descendent of the logical/philosophical tradition in semantics, deals with unembedded tenses, the progressive, the perfect, and embedded tenses. It is hoped that this work also serves the purpose of introducing a formal semantic viewpoint to those who are unfamiliar with it.