It is a fact that tense, aspect and modality together form one of the most recurring and active areas of research in contemporary syntax and semantics, as well as in other disciplines of linguistics. A large number of syntactic and semantic phenomena are concerned by the temporal-aspectual-modal level of representation: information about time, aspect and modality is part of virtually all sentences; inflexion is quite widely considered as the core of syntactic projections. Because of this very crucial situation and role in the sentence structure, temporal-aspectual and modal information concerns virtually any part of the sentence and this information has scope over the whole characterization of the eventuality denoted by the sentence. This book is an up-to-date milestone for the studies of temporality and language, in particular regarding syntax and semantics, but with incidental hints to pragmatics and theories of human natural language understanding. Through this very tight selection of 15 papers (originally delivered during the 6th Chronos colloquium), tenses, aspect and modality are investigated both at the descriptive and theoretical levels, involving many different Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. The volume sheds light on a wide array of phenomena that remained too little explored until now. These include the following: modal subordination in Japanese, epistemic modals in Dutch and English in Free Indirect Speech contexts, aspectual readings of idioms, adverb-licensing with the German perfect, French imperfective past compared with English progressive past, infinitival perfect in English, Adult Root Infinitives, economy constraints on temporal subordinations, future modality, past interpretation of present tense in embedded clauses, and time without tenses in Mandarin and Navajo. The book is of interest to scholars and advanced students in the fields of linguistics (general linguistics, semantics, syntax) as well as philosophy and logic.

This book is an up-to-date milestone for the studies of temporality and language, in particular regarding syntax and semantics. Tenses, aspectand modality are investigated both at the theoretical and at the descriptive levels, involving many differe

Syntax – the study of sentence structure – has been at the centre of generative linguistics from its inception and has developed rapidly and in various directions. The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Syntax provides a historical context for what is happening in the field of generative syntax today, a survey of the various generative approaches to syntactic structure available in the literature and an overview of the state of the art in the principal modules of the theory and the interfaces with semantics, phonology, information structure and sentence processing, as well as linguistic variation and language acquisition. This indispensable resource for advanced students, professional linguists (generative and non-generative alike) and scholars in related fields of inquiry presents a comprehensive survey of the field of generative syntactic research in all its variety, written by leading experts and providing a proper sense of the range of syntactic theories calling themselves generative.

In recent years, we have witnessed, on the one hand, an increased interest in cross-linguistic data in formal semantic studies, and, on the other hand, an increased concern for semantic issues in language typology. However, only few studies combine semantic and typological research for a particular semantic domain (such as the papers in Bach et al. (1995) on quantification and Smith (1997) on aspect). This book brings together formal semanticists with a cross-linguistic perspective and/or those working on lesser-known languages, and typologists interested in semantic theory, to discuss semantic variation in the specific domain of Tense, Aspect, and Mood/Modality.

This volume addresses problems of semantics regarding the analysis of tense and aspect (TA) markers in a variety of languages, including Arabic, Croatian, English, French, German, Russian, Thai, and Turkish. Its main interest goes out to epistemic uses of such markers, whereby epistemic modality is understood as indicating “a degree of compatibility between the modal world and the factual world” (Declerck). All contributions, moreover, tackle these problems from a more or less cognitive point of view, with some of them insisting on the need to provide a unifying explanation for all usage types, temporal and non-temporal, and all of them accepting the premise that the semantics of TA categories essentially refers to subjective, rather than objective, concerns. The volume also represents one of the first attempts to gather accounts of TA marking (in various languages) that are explicitly set within the framework of Cognitive Grammar. Ultimately, this volume aims to contribute to establishing an awareness that modal meaning elements are directly relevant to the analysis of the grammar of time.

The volume proposes original semantic analyses on items marking grammatical aspect. The contributions deal with structurally divergent languages, setting to the fore some less studied forms coding aspect, revisiting or challenging certain conventionalized views on aspectual categories and shedding light on interactions between aspect and modality, another multifaceted semantic category. In doing so, the volume is intended to emphasize the diversity of aspectual systems and the fuzzy semantics of grammatical aspect and help the reader to make their own mind on a topic traditionally viewed as a subcategory of verbal aspect together with lexical aspect. Contributors are Denis Apothéloz, Trang Phan and Nigel Duffield, Galia Hatav, Jens Fleischhauer and Ekaterina Gabrovska, Stephen M. Dickey, Adeline Patard, Laura Baranzini, Jaroslava Obrtelova.

This book deals with the linguistic treatment of tense-aspect-modal-evidential (TAME) expressions in translations of the French novel L’Étranger by Albert Camus into sixteen languages. It is strongly empirical in spirit, and uses the method of contrastive linguistics and multilingual comparison through the use of parallel corpora. It has five main parts: the first two offer insights into perfect and imperfect tenses in Indo-European languages; the third part shifts the focus on non Indo-European languages; the fourth part deals with modality, and the last part is more translation-oriented. These contents make this book a valuable contribution in semantic micro-typology. In terms of readership, both linguists and specialists in translation, as well as literature scholars, can benefit from the contributions presented in this book. It also relates to other usage-based, corpus-driven studies of TAME phenomena, and to monographs that take as their object of study the use of corpus linguistics in translation studies.

The authors bridge the gap between the semantic and syntactic properties of verb tense and aspect, suggest a unified account of tense and aspect using Chomsky's Principles and Parameters Framework and compare tense and aspect systems in Romance languages with Germanic ones. In the OXFORD STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE SYNTAX series.

This Handbook is a comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible guide to the topics and theories that current form the front line of research into tense, aspect, and related areas.

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.