Tense, Mood and Aspect: Theoretical and Descriptive Issues.

✍ Scribed by Louis de Saussure, Jacques Moeschler, Genoveva Puskas

• Publisher: Rodopi
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 248
• Series: Cahiers Chronos
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Table of contents......Page 8
Introduction......Page 10
The descriptive inadequacy of Reichenbach's tense system: A new proposal......Page 16
The evaluation of aspectual distance, speed and progress......Page 36
The grammaticalization of tense markers: A pragmatic reanalysis......Page 56
Aspectual interactions between predicates and their external arguments in French......Page 76
Alors as a possible temporal connective in discourse......Page 90
The power of prepositions: Is he sleeping now or usually?......Page 104
On the dual nature of the Catalan present perfect......Page 120
Epistemic modality and questions in dialogue. The case of Italian interrogative constructions in the subjunctive mood......Page 138
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......Page 164
Dutch equivalents of the German past conjunctive: zou +infinitive and the modal preterit......Page 186
Slavic verb prefixes are resultative......Page 206
The acquisition of aspect in child Greek: A production experiment......Page 224
The Thai cla: a marker of tense or modality?......Page 238