This article examines the so-called ‘narrative when’ construction in English. No one has come up with an entirely satisfactory description of this construction which accounts appropriately for both its syntax and content. The descriptive challenge is to explain the unusual balance between the main clause and the when clause: unlike an ordinary temporal when clause (which offers circumstantial information in relation to the main clause), a narrative when clause expresses the primary situation while the main clause merely has a supporting textual function. This article suggests a simple framework for the description of all when clauses within which narrative when clauses are very comfortably accommodated as one of the metaphorical extensions of the basic meaning and syntax of when.

In this paper I want to present a practical descriptive approach to the semantics of grammatical categories, especially of the binary type involving two forms only. In doing so, I hope to be able to attract the attention of linguists concerned with the structure of a comprehensive semantic theory of human language. Substitutional relations of a grammatical kind (as opposed to syntactic and lexical relations) are too often neglected in textbooks on modern semantics. For example, in Ruth Kempson's otherwise excellent introduction to semantic theory (Kempson, 1977), there is no mention of the semantics of grammatical categories at all. In my view, not only must such Substitutional relations be accommodated within a total theory of semantics – even on a narrow definition of the discipline – but they may provide important insights into the nature of meaning which will affect some of the current suppositions in semantic theory. In particular I shall attempt to shed light on the role of ‘subjectivity’ – a notion which is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore and which challenges the very common restriction among semanticists of the scope of semantics to just a truth-conditional component.

The Slavonic notion of ‘vid’ (= ‘aspect’) has recently received much attention from the viewpoint of general linguistics. Not surprisingly, perhaps, some of the major contributions to the study of aspect as a general metalinguistic category are offered by linguists who are anxious to treat aspect in terms so general that the category applies to as many specific problem areas in non-Slavonic languages as possible (such as the opposition between the so-called progressive and non-progressive forms in English and the opposition between the imparfait and the passé simple in literary French). However, in my view, a satisfactory assessment of aspect in non-Slavonic languages can only be arrived at if we obey the following two conditions: (1) the general metalinguistic category of aspect must be defined independently of problem areas in non-Slavonic languages; (2) the relationship between aspect and other categories traditionally associated with the verb (especially tense and Aktionsart) must be specified.