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
Chapter Title
Valori modali dell’imperfetto in italiano e in bulgaro. Una rassegna contrastiva
Authors
Andrea Trovesi
Language
Italian
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0216-9.15
Peer Reviewed
Publication Year
2023
Copyright Information
© 2023 Author(s)
Content License
Metadata License
Book Title
Studi contrastivi di linguistica slava: grammatica e pragmatica
Editors
Rosanna Benacchio, Lucyna Gebert
Authors
Andrea Trovesi
Peer Reviewed
Number of Pages
204
Publication Year
2023
Copyright Information
© 2023 Author(s)
Content License
Metadata License
Publisher Name
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
Series Title
Biblioteca di Studi Slavistici
Series ISSN
2612-7687
Series E-ISSN
2612-7679