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.

Contents

Tanja Mortelmans and Walter De Mulder: Introduction Werner Abraham and Cláudio C. e C. Gonçalvez: Non-state imperfectives in Romance and West-Germanic: How does Germanic render the progressive? Maria Asnes: Aspectual symmetry between indirect locative and external arguments: the French case Fabienne Martin: Revisiting the distinction between accomplishments and achievements Matti Miestamo and Johan van der Auwera: Negation and perfective vs. imperfective aspect António Leal: Some semantic aspects of gerundive clauses in European Portuguese Gerhard Schaden: Introducing the present perfective puzzle Björn Rothstein: Why the present perfect differs crosslinguistically. Some new insights Karen Deschamps and Hans Smessaert: (Non)-modal uses of the present indicative in Dutch legislation Adeline Patard and Arnaud Richard: Attenuation in French simple tenses Patrick Caudal: Towards a novel aspectuo-temporal account of conditionals