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.

1: Astrid De Wit, Frank Brisard, Carol Madden-Lombardi, Michael Meeuwis, and Adeline Patard: Beyond aspectual semantics: Explorations in the pragmatic and cognitive functions of aspect 2: Pier Marco Bertinetto: On the 'propulsive' Imperfect: Stylistic functions of abrupt aspectual switches in modern Italian narrative texts 3: Agnès Celle: Aspect, modality, interrogativity: A semantic study of aller and venir (de) + infinitive in an open interrogative 4: Adeline Patard: A counterfactual cycle: Evidence from the French imperfect 5: Astrid De Wit and Stephen M. Dickey: An epistemic approach to aspectual systems: English, Russian, and Beyond 6: Laura A. Michaelis: What is the Event Elaboration Constraint 7: Bert Le Bruyn, Martijn van der Klis, and Henriëtte de Swart: Variation and stability: the HAVE-perfect and the tense-aspect grammar of western European languages 8: Thera Marie Crane, Hilde Gunnink, Ponsiano Kanijo, and Tim Roth: Aspect and evidentiality in four Bantu languages 9: Stéphane Robert: The speaker's viewpoint on events: From tense to stance 10: Door Spruijt, Astrid De Wit, and Connie de Vos: The cognitive foundation of time: Evidence from the sign language Kata Kolok 11: Carol Madden-Lombardi and Monique Flecken: Empirical contributions to the study of aspect from the field of cognitive science 12: Aliyah Morgenstern, Christophe Parisse, and Sophie de Pontonx: Children's use of tenses beyond time: Constructing worlds through language

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.

Adopts a multidisciplinary methodological approach to the analysis of aspect Explores non-prototypical contexts in which aspectual constructions are used Draws on data from languages that are understudied with respect to their aspectual system