This book is a collection of articles dealing with theoretical issues in the study of tense, mood and aspect, as well as with specific semantic and syntactic problems raised by linguistic expressions dedicated to these domains across a variety of languages. Through these papers, strong variations are explored, but also crosslinguistic convergences are investigated. Numerous phenomena so far often left aside in linguistics are described and enlightened by different scientific standpoints, which they serve to illustrate. The languages investigated in this volume include Germanic languages (Dutch, English, German), Romance (French, Catalan, Italian), Slavic (Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Russian), Greek, and non-indoeuropean languages such as Thai, Digo and Kikuyu. Related topics such as grammaticalization, presuppositions, questions in dialogue, illocutionary acts and acquisition are incidentally called upon in order to shed light from the outside onto tense, mood (and modality) and aspect. This volume is of great interest for all scholars engaged in contemporary research on the linguistic expression of tense, mood and aspect. The papers gathered in this volume are a tight selection of the ones that were presented at the 6th
Chronos colloquium.
"this volume represents an extremely useful collection of articles that deserve the attention of all those who are interested in achieving an understanding of the threefold domain of tense, mood and aspect." – in:
French Language Studies 18 (2008)
"This volume presents a showcase of recent research into semantics in Indo-European. The very fine-grained approach to tense and aspect will provide food for thought for any researcher interested in how structure and semantics interplay, not just in French or in Romance, but across all languages." – in:
New Zealand Journal of French Studies 29/1 (2008)
"an inspiring collection of articles that will promote new ideas and advances in the Tense, Aspect and Modality domain of research." – in:
The Linguist List
Louis de SAUSSURE:
Introduction Co VET:
The descriptive inadequacy of Reichenbach’s tense system: A new proposal Hans SMESSAERT:
The evaluation of aspectual distance, speed and progress Steve NICOLLE:
The grammaticalization of tense markers: A pragmatic reanalysis Maria ASNES:
Aspectual interactions between predicates and their external arguments in French Anne Le DRAOULEC and Myriam BRAS: Alors
as a possible temporal connective in discourse Tijana ASIC:
The power of prepositions: Is he sleeping now
or usually?
Hortènsia CURELL and Mercè COLL:
On the dual nature of the Catalan present perfect Andrea ROCCI:
Epistemic modality and questions in dialogue. The case of Italian interrogative constructions in the subjunctive mood André MEINUNGER:
In the mood of desire and hope: remarks on the German subjunctive, the verb second phenomenon, the nature of volitional predicates and speculations on illocution Linde ROELS, Tanja MORTELMANS and Johan van der AUWERA:
Dutch equivalents of the German past conjunctive: zou +
infinitive and the modal preterit Boban ARSENIJEVIĆ:
Slavic verb prefixes are resultative Sophia DELIDAKI:
The acquisition of aspect in child Greek: A production experiment Jiranthara SRIOUTAI:
The Thai cla:
a marker of tense or modality?