Cahiers Chronos – serie

This volume gathers nine contributions dealing with Aorists and Perfects. Drinka challenges the notion of Aoristic Drift in Romance languages. Walker considers two emergent uses of the Perfect in British English. Jara seeks to determine the constraints on tense choice within narrative discourse in Peruvian Spanish. Henderson argues for a theory based on Langacker’s ‘sequential scanning’ in Chilean and Uruguayan Spanish. Delmas looks at ’Ua in Tahitian, a polysemic particle with a range of aspectual and modal meanings. Bourdin addresses the expression of anteriority with just in English. Yerastov examines the distribution of the transitive be Perfect in Canadian English. Fryd offers a panchronic study of have-less perfect constructions in English. Eide investigates counterfactual present perfects in Mainland Scandinavian dialects.

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.

If there’s a domain in linguistics which complexity calls for ever further research, it’s clearly that of tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality, often referred to as ‘TAME’. The reason for which these domains of investigation have been connected so tightly as to deserve a common label is that their actual intertwining is so dense that one can hardly measure their effects purely individually, without regard to the other notions of the spectrum. On the other hand, despite their imbrications, tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality remain – needless to say – separate theoretical entities. The papers gathered in this volume cover a range of issues and a variety of methods that help delineate, each in its way, new perspectives on this broad domain.

Si le temps occupe une place aussi centrale dans la discussion linguistique, et depuis si longtemps, c’est parce que ce sujet – avec ses sujets-frères que sont l’aspect, la modalité et l’évidentialité – est non seulement riche et complexe mais aussi profondément enraciné dans la langue, se manifestant à tous ses niveaux et dans une quantité importante de contextes de réflexion.Les articles recueillis dans ce volume se présentent à premier abord comme des études spécifiques sur des phénomènes précis, mais il s’avère rapidement que, de par sa nature, le sujet ‘temps’ ne peut pas être abordé de manière « isolée », puisqu'il parcourt la langue comme un système étendu, sans qu’on puisse en dessiner les limites avec clarté.The reason why tense has occupied such a central place in linguistic discussion, and has done so for so long, is that this topic - along with its related topics aspect, modality and evidentiality - is not only rich and complex but also deeply rooted in language, manifesting itself at all its levels and in a significant number of contexts. The contributions collected in this volume appear at first sight as specific studies of specific phenomena, but it soon becomes clear that, by its very nature, the subject of 'time' cannot be approached in 'isolation', since it runs through the language as a pervasive system, without its boundaries being clearly defined.

Le titre de ce numéro des Cahiers Chronos fait allusion à la notion d’origo forgée par Karl Bühler et à sa thèse selon laquelle ici et maintenant définissent, respectivement pour l’espace et pour le temps, le point zéro de tout repérage déictique et sont donc, avec le pronom je, les embrayeurs (indexicaux) par excellence. Cette théorie, qui a connu un succès considérable auprès des linguistes, n’a pas eu que des effets positifs, car, en s’imposant comme une sorte de postulat, elle a bridé la réflexion sur les indexicaux et plus particulièrement sur ici et maintenant, sur leur statut et sur leur conditions d’emploi. Mais aujourd’hui, on prend heureusement conscience des lacunes que présente la recherche dans ce domaine, et l’ambition du présent volume est justement de participer à l'effort collectif entrepris pour les combler. Il s’adresse donc à tous les linguistes qui s’intéressent aux indexicaux et aux spécificités de leur fonctionnement.

Cet ouvrage propose de jeter un nouveau regard sur des questions qui sont au cœur des problématiques de linguistique française étudiés dans les Cahiers Chronos. Plusieurs auteurs étudient des questions de temps et d’aspect (Apothéloz & Nowakowska, Haas & Huyghe, Lauze, Lebas-Fraczak, Moline, Provôt ; Deslés & Vinzerich) ou des emplois modaux (Engel ; Forsgren & Sullet-Nylander, Lansari, Morency, Patard & Vermeulen). D’autres étudient la temporalité dans le discours (Bres, de Saussure), adoptent une perspective diachronique (De Mulder, Vetters) ou abordent la temporalité du point de vue de l’enseignement du FLE (Barbazan). La diversité des approches réunies dans ce volume fera avancer les débats et sera une source pour de nouvelles contributions.

The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 7th Chronos colloquium in Antwerp (2006). They specifically focus on issues dealing with the categories of Aktionsart, aspect and tense, and the possible relations between these categories, mainly in Germanic and Romance languages. Some of the papers in this collection put the relation between tense and modal meaning into focus, which was in fact the Antwerp conference’s special topic. More in particular, the papers in this volume deal with: non-state imperfectives in Romance and West-Germanic; aspectual properties of French locative constructions; a new typology of accomplishments and achievements; the compatibility of (im)perfective aspect with negation; temporal properties of gerundive adjunct clauses in Portuguese; the Present Perfective Puzzle; the multiple meanings of the present perfect in the Germanic languages; modal uses of present and non-present tenses in Dutch and French; the impossibility to use ‘perfective’ viewpoint tenses in conditional protases.

Tense, aspect and mood have attracted much attention in the areas of both first and second language acquisition, but scholars in the two disciplines often fail to learn from each other. Western European languages have also been the focus of most studies, but there would be lessons to learn from less studied languages. This volume offers new insights on tense, aspect and mood by bringing together the findings of first and second language acquisition, and comparing child and adult, monolingual and multilingual learning processes that are approached from various theoretical points of view. In addition, it spans over a wide range of less studied languages (Bulgarian, Hebrew, Korean, Russian), and Western European languages are studied from new angles.

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.