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Among the many peculiarities of the German tense system which make its description or reconstruction such a difficult task to perform, there is one outstanding stumbling-block, viz. the relation between the - morphologically simple - Preterite and the - compound - (Present-)Perfect. Disregarding problems of variety - in spoken German in the South, the Preterite either doesn't exist or is restricted to modal verbs, e.g.
In the first part of this contribution, we will present, as a starting point for the following discussions, a simple formal language P containing one stative predicate. We will then discuss, on an intuitive level, how a treatment of predicates of change could be conceived, and how the progressive could be rendered in a formal language.
We will then give a formal definition of a language, TP1, based on P, and we will construct a semantics for TP1, which incorporates the ideas discussed.