Beyond Aspectual Semantics: Explorations in the Pragmatic and Cognitive Realms of Aspect

Astrid De Wit · Frank Brisard · Carol Madden-Lombardi · Michael Meeuwis · Adeline Patard

mar 2024 · Oxford University Press

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This volume brings together insights from leading scholars in the field of grammatical aspect to examine the multifaceted nature of this pivotal linguistic resource used to express temporal meaning. The contributors explore the many ways in which linguistic research can move beyond canonical semantic analyses of aspect, which still focus to a great extent on objective temporal features of what can be called 'situation models', i.e. integrated cognitive representations of designated states of affairs. The chapters in this volume widen this outlook by concentrating on less typical contexts in which aspectual constructions are used, e.g. for affective purposes, to mark the epistemic status of situations, or to shape narrative structures. This focus on non-prototypicality is also reflected in the languages investigated, many of which are understudied with respect to their aspectual constructions, including several African languages and the sign language Kata Kolok. The volume adopts a multidisciplinary methodological approach, and introduces possible directions for future research based on experimental studies, fieldwork research, and translation mining.

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Astrid De Wit is Assistant Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Antwerp, having previously held positions at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her monograph The Present Perfective Paradox Across Languages was published by OUP in 2017. Frank Brisard is Associate Professor at the University of Antwerp and a member of the research group 'Grammar and Pragmatics'. His research is informed by a cognitive-functional and usage-based approach to language, combined with a pragmatic focus on the analysis of language in use. He is an associate editor of the journal Pragmatics and co-editor of the Bibliography of Pragmatics and Handbook of Pragmatics. Carol Madden-Lombardi is Senior Researcher at the CNRS, working in the Cognition, Action, and Sensorimotor Plasticity Laboratory at the University of Bourgogne in Dijon. Her research employs behavioural and neuroscience methodologies to investigate the embodied and modality-specific nature of language representations. Michael Meeuwis is Professor of African Languages at Ghent University. His research focuses on the history of colonial and missionary linguistics in Central Africa and on the study of the grammar of languages in the region. His most recent book is A Grammatical Overview of Lingála (Lincom, 2020). Adeline Patard is Maître de Conferences at Caen University, where she teaches medieval French, diachronic linguistics, and corpus linguistics. Her research explores the semantics and pragmatics of TAM markers from a contrastive and diachronic perspective, and she is the editor of the journal Syntaxe & Sémantique.