This English-language contribution to the Cahiers Chronos series—mainly published in French—presents a rare opportunity to catch up on new European developments in this active field of research through this collection of selected papers from the 6th Chronos colloquium. The chapters focus mostly on semantic issues in the study of tense, mood, and aspect (TMA) as well as on comparing and contrasting linguistic expressions that reflect these grammatical categories across a variety of languages. The range of topics in this work is fairly broad, as related issues such as grammaticalization, presuppositions, questions in dialogue, illocutionary acts, argument structure, and first language (L1) acquisition are brought in to shed light onto TMA meanings.
In what I found to be the most engaging chapter, Co Vet takes up the classical Reichenbach formalism that represents tense and aspect with the points Event, Speech, and Reference (R). Using the French system of tenses as examples, he cogently points out that R is not useful in mapping future eventualities. He proposes a binary formalism using a perspective point to solve such classical problems as the polysemy of the passé composé. Other chapters that deal with aspect include Smessaert's chapter on Dutch adverbs charting the internal structure of events, Asnes's chapter on the contribution of the external argument to the aspectual composition of clausal meaning, Currell and Coll's chapter on present perfect in Catalan, and Arsenjevic's chapter on Serbo-Croatian and Czech perfective prefixes. Arsenjevic argues that all prefixes are resultative (not a novel idea by far) but also treats them as agreement markers between the causal and the resulting subevent, which is a fresh approach. Finally, Delidaki checks the validity of the aspect before tense hypothesis in child Greek.
Three chapters focus on temporal properties of various lexical items. Nicolle analyzes the grammaticalization of movement verbs into tense markers, Le Draoulec and Bras look at the French adverb alors, and Asic investigates the temporal interpretation of spatial prepositions in Serbo-Croatian and Kikuyu. Four chapters engage in mood and modal properties: Rocci explores the subjunctive in Italian interrogative constructions; Meinunger examines how the German subjunctive interacts with the verb second phenomenon; Roels, Mortelmans, and van der Auwera inspect the Dutch conjunctive; and Srioutai focuses on the Thai modal cla, which marks modality rather than tense, similar to English will.
This work may be of interest for scholars and graduate students engaged in research on the acquisition of TMA-related properties. However, the book should be treated as a journal issue: The chapters can be read individually, depending on one's interest. Additionally, the quality of the chapters is uneven. Many of them are not developed beyond what can be presented in a 20-min conference presentation. As a result, many analyses feel sketchy and beg more questions than they really answer. Some chapters are not original enough to deserve being published; unfortunately, the single acquisition contribution falls into this category. In reading the collection, I was trying to see which chapters could make some interesting predictions for SLA, and the works by Asnes and Meinunger stood out in this respect. The book also has its fair share of typos and errors, the cutest one being from the introduction: “specific aspectual features beared by these adverbs” (p. 2). In the final analysis, this collection is a useful semantic overview of new research on TMA coming from Europe; however, it may be of limited value to the SLA researcher.
