Speaking English in a global setting: the grammatical aspec

32 situation and is grammatically expressed by determiners, tense, and modality. Determiners ground things in the current discourse, tense grounds situations in time and reality space, and modality grounds situations in potentiality space. The information that a speaker provides on situations (semantically, the aspectual type, the time, the type of reality) is expressed within the verb com-plex (grammatically, these are aspect, tense, modality) in a sentence. Aspect specifies the temporal structure of a situation, thus is part of the situation itself. Tense specifies the time of a situation and at the same time invokes notions on its reality status. Whenever we think or speak of events or states we refer them to and assess them with respect to reality. Reality evolves from the past to the present into the future. The known reality comprises the situations which we know occurred in the past. Any thought, emotion, perception, event that we experience at the present moment are parts of immediate reality. Both known reality and imme-diate reality are thought to be factual reality. A future situation that we can more or less safely predict from experi-ences in the past or present belongs to projected reality. Present or future situations that we judge as having the potential to become realized belongs to potential reality. Past events and situations that we regret of and events we have no knowledge of which applies to most events in the world and situa-tions which we only imagine or wish to occur, belong to the world of unreality. Speakers’ attitude to reality is called modality. Modality characterizes a situa-tion as having potential reality or belonging to unreality. Modality can be ei-ther objective (potential reality) or subjective (unreality). THE MODEL OF REALITY Known reality Past time Immediate reality Present time Factual reality Projected reality Future time Potential reality Present time + Future time modal verbs Past unreality Modality Unreality P...