Universal Categories, Single Language Realisations: Aspectuality in French and other Romance Languages

Aspect and Aktionsart are both categories that codify information on the internal temporal structure of states of affairs. In traditional studies on aspectuality, a very strict distinction between them is usually made. Aspect is an obligatory grammatical (morphosyntactic) verbal category, which must therefore be expressed in all languages whose verbal systems allow it. Aktionsart is a lexical verbal category and is not subject to such restraints in individual languages. This “bidimensional” perspective – widespread in Linguistics and even more so in Romance Linguistics (see, among many others, Bertinetto 1986; Smith 1991; Squartini 1998) – contrasts with a less common “unidimensional” approach (De Miguel 1999; Verkuyl 1972, 1993). The latter advocates the semantic identity of what, in terms of the linguistic analysis of individual languages, is considered either grammatical or lexical aspect.In this paper, an analysis of aspectuality as a semantic-functional category comprising both aspect and Aktionsart will be introduced by means of a new unidimensional model, which has an onomasiological background and is based on frame semantics (see Dessì Schmid 2014, 2019). In accordance with many studies on cognitive semantics, aspectuality is defined as the structuring of states of affairs through delimitation or bounding (see, e.g., Smith 1997; Bickel 1997; Langacker 1987, 2006; Talmy 1996, 2000); this delimitation principle is further developed and applied in a highly extended and structured way.The paper will focus on French examples but will also consider some data from other Romance languages, although it is applicable to any individual language.