Aspectuality: An Onomasiological Model Applied to the Romance Languages

Hardcover, xiii + 268 pages, NOT ex-library. Gentle external shelfwear, book is clean and bright throughout with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. Issued without a dust jacket. -- This study proposes a new way to understand and compare how languages express the unfolding of an action in time (aspectuality). It breaks from traditional approaches by employing a purely "onomasiological" model. Instead of starting with a grammatical form, like the imperfect tense, and asking what it means, this work starts with a universal concept - such as 'the beginning of an action' (inchoativity) or 'an action in progress' (durativity) - and investigates all the different linguistic tools that various languages use to express it. This innovative methodology is applied systematically across the major Romance languages, specifically French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. The result is a comprehensive, cross-linguistic map of aspectual expression, offering a new typology that accounts for both lexical verbs and complex grammatical constructions.…