This comprehensive examination of tense and grammatical aspect provides fascinating insight into how languages indicate distinctions of time. Providing an in-depth survey of the scholarship from the ancient Greeks through the 1980s, Time and the Verb explains and evaluates every major issue and theory, concentrating on familiar Classical and modern European languages. An invaluable reference tool as well as a major contribution to the history of linguistic sciences, this book will be the standard against which future work on tense and aspect is measured.