Semantics

This chapter reviews key topics in the semantic description of Italian, which have significantly contributed to the theoretical analysis and to the elaboration of models of cross-linguistic variation. The focus is on the meaning of grammatical categories: determiners and quantifiers (including articles and quantifiers), tense and aspect (including deictic and anaphoric tense, aoristic drift, reference time vs event time vs speech time, passato prossimo and passato remoto, imperfective vs perfective aspect, and the relation between deictic and anaphoric tense, on the one hand, and imperfective vs perfective aspect, on the other)), and negation (including negative concord and polarity sensitivity, the nature of expletive negation).