Besides its temporal semantics, the imperfect tense can express a wide range of modal meanings, which occur most typically in spoken varieties of language. The paper contrastively explores the modal uses of the imperfect tense in Italian and Bulgarian, a Romance and Slavic language respectively, and shows to what extent they are similar or diverge in the two languages. Although the basic notional configuration of the imperfect tense in Italian and Bulgarian seems to be exactly the same, occurrences of modal meanings are less frequent in Bulgarian than in Italian. Possible explanatory hypotheses suggest that the peculiarities of the tense system (dedicated future-in-the-past form; specific narrative mood), as well as the different syntactic rules governing the sequence of tenses in related sentences, put major constraints on the development of modal meanings of the imperfect tense in Bulgarian.
Sapienza University of Rome, Italy - ORCID: 0000-0001-7107-5657
Titolo del capitolo
Valori modali dell’imperfetto in italiano e in bulgaro. Una rassegna contrastiva
Autori
Andrea Trovesi
Lingua
Italian
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0216-9.15
Opera sottoposta a peer review
Anno di pubblicazione
2023
Copyright
© 2023 Author(s)
Licenza d'uso
Licenza dei metadati
Titolo del libro
Studi contrastivi di linguistica slava: grammatica e pragmatica
Curatori
Rosanna Benacchio, Lucyna Gebert
Autori
Andrea Trovesi
Opera sottoposta a peer review
Numero di pagine
204
Anno di pubblicazione
2023
Copyright
© 2023 Author(s)
Licenza d'uso
Licenza dei metadati
Editore
Firenze University Press
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0216-9
ISBN Print
979-12-215-0215-2
eISBN (pdf)
979-12-215-0216-9
Collana
Biblioteca di Studi Slavistici
ISSN della collana
2612-7687
e-ISSN della collana
2612-7679