veilleux, pour les rapports entre texte et image, font le reste: études, articles et colloques se multiplient. L’édition d’A. Schnyder et U. Rautenberg vient à point nommé offrir au monde académique l’un des textes fondateurs, accompagné de commentaires qui arpentent judicieusement le vaste terrain mélusinien. C’est là un ouvrage de référence: l’apprécierat-on à sa juste valeur en France et dans les pays anglo-saxons, bien qu’il soit écrit en allemand? Jean-Claude Mühlethaler ★ Louis de Saussure/ Jacques Moeschler/ Genoveva Puskas, Tense, mood and aspect: theoretical and descriptive issues, Amsterdam (Rodopi) 2007, 239 p. (Cahiers Chronos 17) This volume presents a selection of 13 papers from the 6 th Chronos Colloquium dealing with both theoretical issues in the study of tense, mood and aspect, as well as specific semantic and syntactic analysis of linguistic expressions dedicated to these domains across a variety of languages, Germanic languages (Dutch, English and German), Romance (French, Catalan, Italian), Slavic (Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Russian), Greek and non-Indo-European languages (Thai, Digo and Kikuyu). The volume starts off with a new proposal by Vet to organise temporal representations, still with coordinates, but without the defects of the classical system used by Reichenbach. In Vet’s approach, a specific tense function can be assumed by more than one tense form. He focuses on French tenses and his proposal includes to make a tripartition into past, present and future from the two perspective points of a past and present, thus resulting in six tense functions (instead of nine from Reichenbach’s system). Vet argues that in French not all tense should be regarded as pure tenses, as some composed forms can be interpreted both as an aspectual form or a temporal one. Same phenomenon with the Periphrastic Futures which also have an aspectual and a temporal interpretation. Smessaert’s article evaluates the aspectual distance, speed and progress of the actual course of events. For this study, he addresses the Dutch paradigm of adverbial expressions that concern the internal structure of events and states, and tries to chart the various constrains on the combination of objective aspectual information and subjective evaluative information. Nicolle conducts a pragmatic analysis of the structural and semantic changes that occur when a movement verb becomes a tense marker through grammaticalization. He describes constructions in English and Digo, a Bantu language, which derive from movement verbs (like Go and V) and behave syntactically like tense markers in these languages, but describe physical movement rather than temporal relations. He suggests that the structural changes that characterise grammaticalization need not result from semantic changes. «He claims that it is subjectification rather than semantic change which underlies grammaticalization in these cases» (62). In «Aspectual interactions between predicates and their external arguments in French», Asnes shows that there is a need to apply an additional set of semantic distinctions in order to determine if an external argument is likely to have an impact on the VP aspect. She claims that these arguments do interact with their predicates, though in a different manner from that of the internal ones. She suggests that this might happen only if there is an iterative homorphism between the external argument and the complex predicate. She reveals that the unique event homorphism cannot trigger that kind of interactions, and identifies eight combinations of features in ditransitive constructions which she discusses with regard to her French corpus. 227 Besprechungen - Comptes rendus Le Draoulec and Bras investigate French alors in the framework of Discourse Representation Theory and address the question of the temporal property of this adverb. They take the work of Hybertie (1996) 1 who distinguishes temporal uses of alors (with or without a consequential value), merely consequential uses (close to donc) and other uses where alors is a kind of structuration marker. They take alors as a possible Temporal Connective, where its position in the sentence (initial vs internal and final) proves to be a crucial parameter.They show that when occupying an initial position, alors always implies a dependency relation - thus has the connective function - while when in internal and final positions, alors has a softer connective constraint because of its dependency on the semantic-pragmatic context. In this latter case, it cannot be considered a real connective. The article ends on suggestions for further analysis of alors when internal or final. This very complex article by Asic addresses several questions about what is a temporal reading of a sentence through an analysis of the spatial prepositions po/ na in Serbian and its role in the interpretation of the imperfective present. The distribution of these prepositions is not restricted to spatial relations as they also implicate a temporal interval interpretation. Na NP represents a static, discreet contact, while Po NP represents a dynamic, yet continuous contact. «The power of prepositions: Is he sleeping now or usually» ends on a comparison of a similar phenomenon in Kikuyu, a Bantu language. Curell and Coll study the aspectual nature of the Catalan present perfect. Based on a recent neo-Reichenbachian approach, this empirical study provides a better understanding of a problem shared by most Romance languages, i. e. the double value of the present perfect: temporal and aspectual. In the corpus analysed, a strong correlation has been found between predicate type (telic or atelic) and perfect reading (resultative or existential). Curell and Coll’s results show that telic predicates have a resultative reading unless they cooccur with a frequency adverb or a quantified NP in which case they end up with an iterative existential reading. Atelic predicates however have an existential reading unless the context in which they are used establishes a clear unmistakable cause-effect relationship between the event they denote and the resulting state the present perfect communicates. Rocci presents a cross-linguistic investigation of the interaction between epistemic modality and questions in Italian. After drawing a general picture of the compatibility of markers of epistemic modality in Italian with questions, Rocci considers the «che + subjunctive» interrogative construction as a specific marker of epistemic modality and inferential evidentiality in questions. In order to characterize its semantics and to argue for its status of a non-compositional construction, Rocci compares and contrasts it with epistemic predicate credere, the epistemic-inferential future in Italian, and the French inferential conditional. Rocci concludes by showing how Congruity Theory «can be used to represent straightforwardly in terms of a predicate-argument frame the constraints imposed by such a construction on the structure of the dialogue» (131). Meinunger analyses the German subjunctive and argues that many occurrences of dependent V2 clauses in German can be found where an assertive speech act is hard to argue for, especially when using the subjunctive mood «Konjunktiv». He proposes, using a large quantity of examples, that something weaker than assertion is of concern. He maintains that the use of V2 has to do with an attitude of the speaker and not of a third individual (usually expressed as the subject of the matrix clause). He claims that the role of V2 is to introduce new information. In their article, Roels, Mortelmans and van der Auwera contrast the use of German conjunctive (both in its synthetic and analytical form) with the Dutch modal preterit and zou-infinitive. They give an overview of the contexts in which the Dutch «modal» con- 228 Besprechungen - Comptes rendus 1 C. Hybertie 1996: La conséquence en français, Paris. structions appear, paying particular attention to their respective conditions of use.Although zou still shows traces of its origin as a modal verb in some of its uses, one cannot simply equate the German conjunctive with Dutch zou. In «Slavic verb prefixes are resultative», Arsenijevi ú argues that all event-modifying SV- Ps behave in the described way, especially in being resultative. He discusses verb prefixes in Serbo-Croatian and Czech which have a complex two-fold function that combine with their status of semantic predicate modifiers. He develops an analysis in which all-event-modifying prefixes in Slavic languages are related to the predicate of the result of the eventuality, which is usually specified by the resultative component of the meaning of the verb. This is not unexpected considering their aspectual effects and effects on argument structure. In «The acquisition of aspect in child Greek», Delidaki investigates the role of four semantic features (telicity, duration, frequency and completion of a telic event) in the choice of tense and grammatical aspect in the production of 28 Greek-speaking monolingual children and 25 adult native speakers of Greek through six events that the subjects of the study have to report. She applies to Greek the methodology Bronckart and Sinclair (1976) 2 used for French. She shows that lexical aspect influences the choice of tense and grammatical aspect, that duration influences choices mainly when an atelic verb is encountered, with the nuance that adults show however some influence of duration with telics. She also shows that there is a duration limit of «3 seconds» attributed to events below which atelic verbs will be used by children with a past perfective and above which present is selected. Frequency plays a role in the choice of tense for younger group of children. In the last article, Srioutai analyses a Thai marker, cla,which is generally compared to the English will, as in effect cla behaves like will regarding its epistemic and temporal values. However she suggests that cla is more adequately analysed as a modal marker rather than a tense marker. She argues that because it does not stand for the future tense, this confirms that cla is represented in Discourse Representation Theory, since in the absence of adverbs the Discourse Representation Structure could not be completed. She stresses the fact that although a full account for the various types of uses cla can have is proposed as a promising hypothesis that must be further explored and validated. This volume provides a very specialised collection of different and yet very specific aspects of Tense and Mood in European and non-European languages. These articles are of particular interest, especially to experts in the field of Tense and Aspect, as the research presented in this volume, although many of them conclude on the need for more research and analysis, are very specialised. The papers in this volume represent a significant theoretical import. Strong variation are explored and cross-linguistics convergences are investigated. On the whole the volume invites the reader to reflect on topics such as grammaticalization, presuppositions, questions in dialogue, illocutionary acts and acquisition. This is not a volume for linguistics novices, as a lot of theoretical research are referred to, but not explored in detail. A minor defect is typographical errors found in the entire volume, and firstly on the second line of the introduction. Generally speaking most articles have some mistakes with the language or spelling, which sometimes makes it quite hard for non-English speakers to understand the analyses. Isabelle Lemée ★ 229 Besprechungen - Comptes rendus 2 J. P. Bronckart/ H. Sinclair 1976: «Time, Tense, and Aspect», Cognition 2/ 1, 107-30.