This volume contains 13 papers presented at the 6th Chronos colloquium on descriptive and theoretical issues in the study of tense, mood and aspect. The different contributions address this threefold domain through an investigation of specific linguistic features in different languages and cross-linguistically.

The volume opens with a paper by Co Vet questioning the Reichenbachian theoretical framework, with a special focus on its inadequacy to describe the French temporal system. He proposes a new ‘neo-Reichenbachian’ system based on two perspective points, and explains how this twofold system can improve the Reichenbachian system and provide a better description of the French tenses.

Many contributions specifically acknowledge the importance of looking at discourse as a whole, and at the interaction of the different devices used to achieve a better understanding of the expression of temporality in language. In their paper, Anne Le Draoulec and Myriam Bras seek to establish the status of the French temporal adverbial alors and the role it plays in introducing discourse relations. Limiting themselves to event description, they demonstrate that in initial position, alors plays the true role of a temporal connective, whereas in internal and final positions it cannot be considered a connective.

Hans Smessaert's paper attempts to ‘chart the various constraints on the combination of objective aspectual information and subjective evaluative information’ in Dutch, looking specifically at aspectual adverbial expressions that concern the internal structure of events and states: their beginning, continuation and ending. He investigates the interaction of basic aspectual information with the evaluative parameters of ‘distance’, ‘speed’ and ‘progress’. Maria Asnes focuses on aspectual interactions with the external arguments in a clause paying specific attention to ditransitive constructions, she shows how certain types of external arguments are capable of altering the VP aspect, and of affecting the aspectual construction of a clause. Tijana Asic shows how spatial prepositions can have a temporal interpretation. She analyses the po/na (on/over) opposition in Serbian and its role in the interpretation of the imperfective present, as well as temporal adverbs in Kikuyu that can change the default interpretation of tenses. Focusing on the present perfect in Catalan, Hortentia Curell and Merce Coll argue that there is a strong correlation between predicate type and perfect reading, resultative or existential. Basing their study on recent neo-Reichenbachian approaches, they suggest a unified account of the different readings of the present perfect with an aspectual use as opposed to the hodiernal temporal value. They show how telic predicates generally trigger a resultative reading while atelic predicates trigger an existential one, except when a strong cause-effect contextual constraint applies. Boban Arsenjievic investigates Slavic verb prefixes and shows how these prefixes narrow or switch the meaning of the imperfective verb forcing perfective reading. He hence suggests that event-modifying prefixes in Slavic languages are resultative. Steve Nicolle addresses the widely accepted model of grammaticalisation, from pragmatic to semantic to structural change, through an analysis of grammaticalisation chains that involve source constructions containing verbs of movement. Exploring the constructions go get in English and edza, enda, cha in Digo, he demonstrates that grammaticalisation need not involve semantic change. In fact, although these constructions syntactically behave like tense markers, they do not lose their semantic content: they describe physical movement rather than temporal relations. Sophia Delidaki addresses the question of the acquisition of aspect in Greek by children. More precisely, she investigates the role of the four semantic features: telicity, duration, frequency and completion, and shows that lexical aspect affects the choice of tense and aspect by children and adults.

The volume also contains several papers that provide new insights into the understanding of modality across languages. Andrea Rocci's paper offers a preliminary investigation of the interaction of epistemic modality and interrogation in Italian. He offers a semantic analysis of the Italian interrogative construction in the subjunctive mood introduced by the complementiser che, and focuses in particular on the constraints imposed on interpretation by che in such constructions. Andre Meinunger discusses the relation between propositional attitudes and ‘Verb second’ patterns in German, focusing on verbs of propositional attitudes and volitional predicates. Linde Roels, Tanija Mortelmans and Johan van der Auwera examine the differences of the conjunctive mood in Dutch and German. Compared to German which has an obligatory grammatical marker, Dutch has no morphologically realised conjunctive mood. According to their analysis of zou in Dutch and of the Dutch modal preterit, Dutch relies more on contextual information to express conjunctive mood. Jiranthara Srioutai studies the use of the Thai marker cla in naturally occurring language. She questions the traditional description of cla as a future tense marker and attempts to come up with a unified semantic account suggesting that cla is a more marker of modality than a tense marker.

One difficulty I had in understanding this volume was the mathematic formulas used in some of the papers. Therefore, one minor criticism of this work might be that some of the analyses are less accessible to a non-specialised readership. Nonetheless, this volume represents an extremely useful collection of articles that deserve the attention of all those who are interested in achieving an understanding of the threefold domain of tense, mood and aspect.