Taming the TAME Systems ed. by Emmanuelle Labeau, Qiaochao Zhang (review)

This is a welcome addition to the growing number of studies on tense, aspect, modality, and evidentiality (TAME). Like other recent volumes in its series, this book incorporates a range of diverse theoretical approaches and empirical objects (grammatical and lexical phenomena in well-described versus endangered languages, language learning, language comparison and (areal) typology, among others), as well as a wide variety of investigation methods (introspection-based approaches, experimental methods, corpus-based studies). One can only applaud such a well-balanced mix. While Cahiers Chronos used to focus on a particular trend or empirical theme, this new volume strikingly embodies (and demonstrates) the increasing integration and mutual ‘permeability’ of communities of TAME specialists. Owing to its remarkable diversity, the volume will cater to the needs of a wide range of linguists. Swinthat Danielsen’s contribution will appeal to colleagues with a keen eye for highly endangered languages, language contact, and grammaticalization, for it describes a rich particles-to-affixes TAM grammaticalization pattern in Baure (Arawakan, Bolivia), possibly combining ‘universal’, language-internal factors, with language contact parameters. Romanists (as well as those with an interest for experimental linguistics) will appreciate substantial contributions comprising, firstly, a comparative and experimental psycholinguistic study of verbal durativity versus telicity in Spanish and Italian, by Olga Batiukova and others, based on semantic priming techniques; and, secondly, a distributional, experimental account of the Spanish preterite and imperfect with iterated eventualities (although one could claim it is potentially about Mexican Spanish, as the experiment involved native speakers from Mexico) by M. Rafael Salaberry and Custódio Martins. A comparative French–Spanish study of the imparfait/imperfecto marking of hypothetical clauses by José Amenós-Pons completes the set of Romanist contributions. Besides descriptive and experimental linguistics, corpus linguistics is also well represented in the volume, with Christine Paul’s study of the imprecise uses of tenses in an oral corpus of German, Agnès Celle and Laure Lansari’s paper on aller + infinitive and its English counterparts, and Alexandra Vraciu’s account of the acquisition of event encoding by L2 English learners. Of course, the volume also comprises a series of more traditional, largely introspection-based theoretical and formal papers. Semantic contributions include Allan Wallington’s (informal) account of the metaphorical encoding of futurity, Roberlei Bertucci’s pre-formal analysis of Brazilian Portuguese aspectual verbs using Fred Landman’s notion of ‘stages’ (‘The Progressive’, Natural Language Semantics, 1 (1992), 1–32), Jiyoung Choi’s study of ‘inchoative states’ in Korean, and Fabienne Martin’s account of stupide de + V constructions. The latter study connects the individual- versus stage-level readings of such adjectives with tense-aspect semantics in intriguing and intricate ways. Finally, Alda Mari proposes an exciting formal study of covert modal meanings in indefinite generic sentences (as in ‘A lion has a mane’), while theoretical syntactic approaches and issues at the syntax–semantics interface are represented by Gianina Iordǎchioaia and others’ analysis of nominalizations derived from object-experiencer verbs in Greek and Romanian, and by Hongyan Sun’s account of the temporal construal of relative clauses in Mandarin. All in all, the book is a very enlightening read, and one of the most diverse and intellectually exciting volumes of the series published so far.