Tense, Mood and Aspect Theoretical and Descriptive Issues AHIERS CHRONOS 17 Collection dirigée par Carl Vetters (Université du Littoral – Côte d’Opale) Directeur adjoint: Patrick Caudal (CNRS – Université Paris 7) Comité de lecture: Anne-Marie Berthonneau (Université de Lille 3) Andrée Borillo (Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail) Anne Carlier (Université de Valenciennes) Renaat Declerck (KULAK-Courtrai) Walter De Mulder (Université d’Anvers) Patrick Dendale (Université d’Anvers) Ilse Depraetere (KUB - Bruxelles) Dulcie Engel (University of Swansea) Laurent Gosselin (Université de Rouen) Emmanuelle Labeau (Aston University) Véronique Lagae (Université de Valenciennes) Sylvie Mellet (CNRS - Université de Nice) Jacques Moeschler (Université de Genève) Arie Molendijk (Université de Groningue) Louis de Saussure (Université de Neuchâtel) Catherine Schnedecker (Université de Metz) Marleen Van Peteghem (Université de Lille 3) Genoveva Puskas (Université de Genève) Co Vet (Université de Groningue) Carl Vetters (Université du Littoral - Côte d’Opale) Svetlana Vogeleer (Institut Libre Marie Haps - Bruxelles) Marcel Vuillaume (Université de Nice) Ce volume est une réalisation de l’équipe de recherche “HLLI” - EA 4030 de l’Université du Littoral - Côte d’Opale, de la Société Académique de l’Université de Genève (Fonds Charles Bally) et du Groupe de recherche en sémantique et pragmatique de l’Université de Neuchâtel. Tense, Mood and Aspect Theoretical and Descriptive Issues Edited by Louis de Saussure, Jacques Moeschler and Genoveva Puskas Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Cover design: Pier Post Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents - Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2208-9 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in The Netherlands Acknowledgements The Editors are grateful to all the colleagues who spent time helping them in the complicated process of the selection of papers. In particular, all of them who were involved in peer-reviewings deserve a special mention here. We warmly thank the institutions who supported the organization of the 6th Chronos colloquium in Geneva: the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Swiss Academy of Social Sciences, the Academic Society of the University of Geneva, the Faculty of Arts of the University of Geneva. We also thank the Chronos board for giving this opportunity to us, in particular Carl Vetters and Co Vet. This book would not have been published withough the support of the ‘Charles Bally’ fund of the University of Geneva (Academic Society). Last but not least, we are very thankful to Patrick Morency, PhD student at the University of Neuchâtel, for the time and energy he spent with and without Louis de Saussure in proof-readings, manuscript layout checking and editing, bad and missing references tracking, etc. This page intentionally left blank Table of contents Louis de Saussure Introduction 1-5 Co Vet The descriptive inadequacy of 7-26 Reichenbach’s tense system: A new proposal Hans Smessaert The evaluation of aspectual distance, 27-45 speed and progress Steve Nicolle The grammaticalization of tense 47-65 markers: A pragmatic reanalysis Maria Asnes Aspectual interactions between 67-80 predicates and their external arguments in French Anne Le Draoulec Alors as a possible temporal connective 81-94 Myriam Bras in discourse Tijana Asic The power of prepositions: Is he 95-110 sleeping now or usually? Hortènsia Curell On the dual nature of the Catalan 111-127 Mercè Coll present perfect Andrea Rocci Epistemic modality and questions in 129-153 dialogue. The case of Italian interrogative constructions in the subjunctive mood André Meinunger In the mood of desire and hope: remarks 155-176 on the German subjunctive, the verb second phenomenon, the nature of volitional predicates and speculations on illocution Linde Roels Dutch equivalents of the German past 177-196 Tanja Mortelmans conjunctive: zou +infinitive and the Johan van der Auwera modal preterit Boban Arsenijević Slavic verb prefixes are resultative 197-213 Sophia Delidaki The acquisition of aspect in child 215-227 Greek: A production experiment Jiranthara Srioutai The Thai cla: a marker of tense or 229-239 modality? . This page intentionally left blank Introduction Louis de SAUSSURE University of Neuchâtel This volume is a selection of papers presented at the 6th Chronos colloquium dealing with both theortical issues in the study of tense, mood and aspect, and specific semantic and syntactic analysis of linguistic expressions dedicated to these domains across a variety of languages. The contributions presented here address specific linguistic features in order to describe the expression of this threefold domain and provide explanations for them across languages and with a significant theoretical import. Through these papers, strong variations are explored, but also crosslinguistic convergences are investigated. Nume- rous phenomenas 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. The volume is opened by a theoretical concern expressed about the classical symbolic formalism proposed by Reichenbach. In his paper, Co Vet takes issue with this formalism; through a number of criticisms, he proposes a new way to organise temporal representations, still with coordinates, but without the defects of the classical system. Although there is an abundant literature trying to solve the poverty, or, as Vet puts it, the “descriptive inadequacy” of Reichenbach’s formalism, Vet’s paper is a really new proposal. Focusing on French tenses, he convincingly argues that the reference point R cannot be placed in the future in the same way as it can be placed at the present time or at a past time. Vet therefore ends up with a twofold system of tenses for French, that he calls a neo-reichenbachian system, and where two possible positions are available for saturation by a perspective point. With regard to an aspectual notion (phasal aspect), he explains in much details how to solve in such a system classical problems such as the polysemy of the Composed Past and of the Periphrastic Future in French, before addressing overcomposed forms. Hans Smessaert’s paper addresses the Dutch paradigm of adverbial expressions that are about the internal structure of events, which thus have to © Cahiers Chronos 17 (2007) : 1-5. 2 Louis de Saussure do with imperfectivity. His investigation aims at charting “the various constraints on the combination of objective aspectual information and subjective evaluative information” through i) specific aspectual features beared by these adverbs, ii) an evaluative parameter of ‘distance’ (with the boundaries of the considered eventuality), and iii) an evaluative parameter of ‘speed’ and ‘progress’ of “the actual course of events”. He shows how these properties interact, moreover, with basic aspectual information. Steve Nicolle presents a tight analysis of the structural and semantic changes that occur when a movement verb becomes a tense marker through grammaticalization. He takes notably the example of go in cases like go and V. On the syntactic side, he argues that the movement verb can become more closely linked to the main verb that it modifies, loosing its proper inflexional properties and becoming a verbal affix. At the semantic level, he takes into account that the meaning of the considered verb, which relates to the physical movement of an entity relatively to the deictic centre, through this kind of grammaticalization, takes a meaning that is about events and reference time. Exploring such constructions in Digo and English, he argues that it is rather subjectivisation than semantic change that occurs in these cases. Maria Asnes’ paper a She proposes to extend Krifka’s definition of homomorphism to the domain of external arguments, as a result from the observations from Dowty and Jackendoff that not only internal arguments can function as incremental themes. She then formulates her extended version of homomorphism. She takes a systematic look at various situations where external arguments play a role in aspectual determination. With interesting data, she claims for instance that iterativity creates a sort of homomorphism between the denotations of the external arguments and of the verbal predicate, a type of homomorphism which is different, she says, from the unique-event type triggered by the incremental theme relation. In the general idea that homogeneous / heterogeneous reference applies both to nominal and verbal constituents and thus, provides a common ground for the treatment of aspectual interactions, she identifies eight combinations of features in ditransitive constructions, which she discusses with regard to her corpus. Anne Le Draoulec