Abstract

This article deals with the underspecified semantics of the Imperfect in Romance. Our main objective is to identify and to describe the three essential "ingredients" of the abstract semantics of the verbal category: 1. the feature of indeterminacy due to its aspectual nature, 2. its anaphoric character and strong contextual dependency and 3. the share it has with the principle of typicity. We will show throughout the article that these three conceptual "essentials" underlie all major readings of the Imperfect in the Romance languages – irrespective of whether they are temporal or modal in nature. In the last part of the article we proceed to a formalization of the basic insights we have gained by analyzing the different readings of the Imperfect in Romance languages.