Full Description
The present volume is a collection of fourteen original papers selected from those presented at the first US installment of Chronos: International Conference on Tense, Aspect, Mood and Modality, which took place at the University of Texas at Austin in October, 2008. The volume serves as an excellent forum for international scholars working on expressions of on tense, aspect, mood and modality. It contains papers dealing with a diverse variety of languages ranging from well studied languages like English, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Japanese, to less known ones like Basque, Chamorro, Iquito, Australian English and Singlish. The originality and relevance of the individual contributions is highlighted by the broadness of the theoretical approaches they employ and the novel empirical data they examine. All the studies go beyond exploring issues strictly related to tense, aspect, mood and modality; rather, they cut across all main linguistics subfields, such as syntax, semantics, pragmatics, language acquisition and language evolution, thus attesting to how research on tense, aspect, mood and modality is vital to the better understanding of human language in general. This diverse nature of the volume will certainly appeal to broad audience.
Contents
Chiyo Nishida and Cinzia Russi: Introduction
Asier Alcázar and Mario Saltarelli: Why imperative sentences cannot be embedded
Cécile Barbet and Louis de Saussure: Sporadic aspect as a pragmatic enrichment of dynamic root modality
Pier Marco Bertinetto: Tense-aspect acquisition meets typology
Patrick Caudal and Marie-Ève Ritz: Discourse structure and the perfective evolution of the Australian Present Perfect: Some new hypotheses
Pilar Chamorro: Future time reference and irrealis modality in Chamorro: A study of preverbal para
Justin Kelly: The syntax and semantics of infinitival yet constructions
Yusuke Kubota, Jungmee Lee, Anastasia Smirnova and Judith Tonhauser: Cross-linguistic variation in temporal adjunct clauses
Brenda Laca: On modal tenses and tensed modals
I-wen Lai: The realis and irrealis distinction in the Iquito language
Hiroki Nomoto and Nala Huiying Lee: Realis, factuality and derived-level statives: Perspectives from the analysis of Singlish got
Katia Paykin and Fayssal Tayalati: Behavior adjectives: Dynamic, agentive and unergative
Alain Rihs: A defence of the overlap criterion for distinguishing between the French gerund and present participle
Cinzia Russi: Locating Italian volere 'to want' and volerci 'to be needed, to be required' in the Verb-to-TAM chain
Karen Zagona: Ser and estar: Phrase structure and aspect
