Chapter Valori modali dell’imperfetto in italiano e in bulgaro. Una rassegna contrastiva
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Imperfect; Modality; Bulgarian language; Italian languageDOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0216-9.15ISBN
9791221502169, 9791221502169Publisher
Firenze University PressPublisher website
https://www.fupress.com/Publication date and place
Florence, 2023Series
Biblioteca di Studi Slavistici, 54Classification
Linguistics
Literature: history and criticism