This book addresses recent developments in the study of tense from a cross-paradigm and cross-linguistic point of view. Leading international scholars explore challenging ideas about tense at the interfaces between semantics and syntax as well as syntax and morphology. The book is divided into three main subsections: 1) Tense in tenseless languages; 2) Tense, mood, and modality, and 3) Descriptive approaches to some tense phenonema. Although time is a universal dimension of the human experience, some languages encode reference to time without any grammatical tense morphology of the verb. Some of these exceptional “tenseless” languages are investigated in this volume: Kalaallisut, Paraguayan Guaraní and Movima. Modal verbs are polyfunctional in the sense that they express both tense and modality. In this volume, an untypical modal is analyzed, a modal analysis of imperatives is argued for, and sentential mood, which is closely related to modality, is analyzed. It is always interesting to look at the expression of tense in understudied languages, which is done here for Scottish Gaelic, Austronesian Rukai and German dialects. The volume can be used for graduate and undergraduate level teaching

The book provides a nuanced, multimodal perspective on how people express events via certain grammatical forms of verbs in speech and certain qualities of movement in manual gestures. The volume is the outcome of an international project that involved three teams: one each from France, Germany, and Russia, including scholars from the Netherlands and the United States. Aspect and gesture use are studied in three Indo-European languages, i.e. French, German, and Russian. The book also summarizes the main points and arguments from French, German, and Russian works on aspect in relation to tense, bringing these historical traditions together for an English-speaking reading audience. The work rekindles some fundamental theorizing about events and aspect, reinvigorating it in a new light with the use of recent theorizing from cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, as well as new research methods applied to new data from actual spoken, interactive language use. It illustrates the value of researching the variably multimodal nature of communication – as well as theoretical issues in connection with thinking for speaking and mental simulation – from an empirical point of view.

In this pathfinding study, Suzanne Fleischman brings together theory and methodology from various quarters to shed important new light on the linguistic structure of narrative, a primary and universal device for translating our experiences into language. Fleischman sees linguistics as laying the foundation for all narratological study, since it offers insight into how narratives are constructed in their most primary context: everyday speech. She uses a linguistic model designed for "natural" narrative to explicate the organizational structure of "artificial" narrative texts, primarily from the Middle Ages and the postmodern period, whose seemingly idiosyncratic use of tenses has long perplexed those who study them. Fleischman develops a functional theory of tense and aspect in narrative that accounts for the wide variety of functions—pragmatic as well as grammatical—that these two categories of grammar are called upon to perform in the linguistic economy of a narration.

This Cahiers Chronos volume reports on new and ongoing research on tense, aspect and modality in which a variety of languages has been gathered. The languages discussed by the authors include (in alphabetical order): Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian and Spanish. The articles form a selection of the papers presented at the 5th Chronos Conference that took place at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, in June 2002. We have categorized the papers into three sections: Tense, Aspect and Modality. Obviously, this ordering is somewhat arbitrary given that some of the papers cross these rather rigid boundaries, as they discuss the interplay of tense and aspect or tense and modality. This book is of interest for scholars in the field of semantics, logic, syntax, and comparative linguistics.

Since the first written documents in the history of mankind (produced at the end of the 4th millennium BC), translation has always played a pivotal role in human societies. Translators were needed whenever the need for contact between different-speaking communities arose, such as for the purposes of communication, commerce, and declarations of war, or peace. Translation is even more important in today’s world. Globalization has brought the nations of the Earth closer, to the extent that books, movies and television programs released or aired far away in the world are just a click of the mouse away. However, such cultural products still have to be translated in order to be enjoyed by a wider audience. In international relations, diplomacies work very much on the basis of what is said and written, meaning that official documents and political charts need to be correctly and precisely translated. Hi-tech devices, such as tablets and smartphones, have their software translated into an increasing number of languages, in order to be accessible to a larger number of people. The challenging issues that arise for translation studies from these socio-cultural changes in Western Europe and all over the world are tackled in this volume according to two intertwined viewpoints: From a strictly linguistic perspective, typological differences between genetically unrelated languages challenge linguists in gaining an overall understanding of what language really is: how can linguistic categories, be they verbal, nominal or pertaining to other domains of the grammar, be defined? How are they shaped in syntax? From the point of view of anthropological linguistics, on the other hand, the cross-linguistic differences that come to the fore illustrate that translating – as well as language itself – is one of the basic cognitive strategies of the human mind.

This volume puts the European tense-aspect systems in a consistent typological and diachronic perspective.

During the last 10 years, more and more linguistic and psycholinguistic research has been devoted to the study of discourse and written texts. Much of this research deals with the markers that underline the connections and the breaks between clauses and sentences plus the use of these markers -- by adults and children -- in the production and comprehension of oral and written material. In this volume, major observations and theoretical views from both sides of the Atlantic are brought together to appeal to a wide range of linguists, psychologists, and speech therapists. The volume presents contributions from researchers interested specifically in adult language and from others concerned with developmental aspects of language. Some contributors deal primarily with production, whereas others concentrate on comprehension. Some direct their attention to oral discourse while others focus on written texts. To preserve overall coherence, however, the contributors were given the following recommendations: * With regard to the level of linguistic analysis, the emphasis should be on the clause level -- more particularly, on the relationships between clauses. * Special emphasis should also be placed on linguistic markers (e.g., connectives, markers of segmentation, punctuation). * An overview of a given field of research should be offered, and current research should be put into perspective. * For contributors in the developmental field, attention should be paid to the fact that an account of the acquisition of some language functions throughout childhood should be included only if general principles of interclause relations that might be masked by the exclusive examination of adult evidence could be derived from it.

This volume explores the multiple aspects of cyclical syntactic change from a wide range of empirical perspectives. The notion of 'linguistic cycle' has long been recognized as being relevant to the description of many processes of language change. In grammaticalization, a given linguistic form loses its lexical meaning - and sometimes some of its phonological content - and then gradually weakens until it ultimately vanishes. This change becomes cyclical when the grammaticalized form is replaced by an innovative item, which can then develop along exactly the same pathway. But cyclical changes have also been observed in language change outside of grammaticalization proper. The chapters in this book reflect the growing interest in the phenomenon of grammaticalization and cyclicity in generative syntax, with topics including the diachrony of negation, the syntax of determiners and pronominal clitics, the internal structure of wh-words and logical operators, cyclical changes in argument structure, and the relationship between morphology and syntax. The contributions draw on data from multiple language families, such as Indo-European, Semitic, Japonic, and Athabascan. The volume combines empirical descriptions of novel comparative data with detailed theoretical analysis, and will appeal to historical linguists working in formal and usage-based frameworks, as well as to typologists and scholars interested in language variation and change more broadly.

Language complexity has recently attracted considerable attention from linguists of many different persuasions. This volume – a thematic selection of papers from the conference Approaches to Complexity in Language, held in Helsinki, August 2005 – is the first collection of articles devoted to the topic. The sixteen chapters of the volume approach the notion of language complexity from a variety of perspectives. The papers are divided into three thematic sections that reflect the central themes of the book: Typology and theory, Contact and change, Creoles and pidgins. The book is mainly intended for typologists, historical linguists, contact linguists and creolists, as well as all linguists interested in language complexity in general. As the first collective volume on a very topical theme, the book is expected to be of lasting interest to the linguistic community.