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

This volume examines the multifaceted nature of (grammatical) aspect. The chapters explore less typical contexts in which aspectual constructions are used, and draw on data from a range of languages, many of them understudied, including several African languages and the sign language Kata Kolok.

Astrid De Wit, Assistant Professor of English Linguistics, University of Antwerp,Frank Brisard, Associate Professor of English Linguistics, University of Antwerp,Carol Madden-Lombardi, Senior Researcher, CNRS/Université de Bourgogne,Michael Meeuwis, Professor of African Linguistics, Ghent University,Adeline Patard, Maître de Conférences, Université de Caen Basse-Normandie

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.