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.

This book offers both a retrospective view on how theories of aspectuality have developed over the past 30 years, and presents current, new directions of aspectuality research. The articles in this book take a wide crosslinguistic scope including aspectual analyses of the following languages: English and two varieties of English: African American English and Colloquial Singapore English, Italian, French, Bulgarian, Czech, Mandarin Chinese, West-Greenlandic, Wakashan languages, and Nahk-Daghestanian languages.

This Handbook is a comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible guide to the topics and theories that current form the front line of research into tense, aspect, and related areas.

In Revisiting Aspect and Aktionsart, Francis G.H. Pang employs a corpus approach to analyze the relationship between Greek aspect and Aktionsart. Recent works have tried to predict the meanings that emerge when a certain set of clausal factors and lexical features combine with one of the grammatical aspects. Most of these works rely heavily on Zeno Vendler's telicity distinction. Based on empirical evidence, Pang argues that telicity and perfectivity are not related in a systematic manner in Koine Greek. As a corollary, Aktionsart should be considered an interpretive category, meaning that its different values emerge, not from the interaction of only one or two linguistic parameters, but from the process of interpreting language in context.

This synchronic study presents a new onomasiological, frame-theoretical model for the description, classification and theoretical analysis of the cross-linguistic content category aspectuality. It deals specifically with those pieces of information, which, in their interplay, constitute the aspectual value of states of affairs. The focus is on Romance Languages, although the model can be applied just as well to other languages, in that it is underpinned by a principle grounded in a fundamental cognitive ability: the delimitation principle. Unlike traditional approaches, which generally have a semasiological orientation and strictly adhere to a semantic differentiation between grammatical aspect and lexical aspect (Aktionsart), this study makes no such differentiation and understands these as merely different formal realisations of one and the same content category: aspectuality.

This volume brings together a collection of articles exploring tense and aspect phenomena in a variety of non-related languages: Indo-European (Albanian, Bulgarian, Armenian, English, Norwegian, Hindi), Hamito-Semitic (Berber, Zenaga Berber, Arabic varieties, Neo-Aramaic), African (Wolof, Langi), Asian (Badaga, Korean, Mongolian languages – Khalkha, Buriat, Kalmuck – Thaï, Tibetic languages), Amerindian (Yucatec Maya, Sikuani), Greenlandic (Eskimo) and Oceanian (Nêlêmwa). Each article is grounded in solid empirical knowledge. It offers an in-depth study of aspectual and temporal devices as manifested in many diverse and complex ways from a cross-linguistic perspective and seeks to contribute to our understanding of the domain under consideration and more broadly to linguistic typology and theoretical linguistics, especially the enunciative approach. The book gives readers access to a collection of data and is of particular interest to scholars working on aspectuality and temporality, on pragmatics, on areal linguistics and on typology.