Full Description
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.
Contents
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?
