Tense - Aspect acquisition meets typology

Throughout this paper, the semantic domain under scrutiny will be designated by the acronym ATAM (i.e., Actionality / Temporality / Aspect / Modality). This involves a modification of the usual practice, where TAM (or TMA) is routinely used. As will soon become clear, however, the actionality category cannot be neglected, considering its role in the semantics and acquisition of tense and aspect phenomena. Note further – as the spelling-out of the above acronym suggests – that the term ‘temporality’, rather than ‘tense’, will be used. This is a most important conceptual (even more than terminological) matter. One should best restrain the word ‘tense’ to the morphosyntactic categories to be observed in the grammar of individual languages, rather than to the semantic/cognitive domain of temporality. Consider for instance the Romance Imperfect: in its prototypical uses, this tense conveys the aspectual value ‘imperfectivity’ and the temporal value ‘past’, i.e. it conveys both aspectual and temporal information. Consequently, it would be confusing to use the word ‘tense’ to indicate both a particular grammatical category (in this example, the Imperfect) and the temporality domain at large. Note, further, that the Romance Imperfect is no exception. Any tense conveys both aspectual and temporal information, even though one of the two (or both) may be underdetermined in one way or another. The German Preterite, for instance, conveys the temporal value ‘past’, but is aspectually underspecified for it neutralizes the values ‘perfective’ and ‘imperfective’. Yet, in most cases the language user may assign this tense the relevant aspectual interpretation by exploiting the appropriate contextual cues (Bertinetto 2008). Indeed, all the relevant semantic dimensions (actionality, temporality, aspect and mood) are necessarily detectable in