Towards a typology of time and aspect systems

The approach adopted is a departure from that traditionally adopted in linguistic typology. Instead of presenting the different types of language, ordered according to their organization at the level of the aspectual-temporal system, we try to show how any language is "defective" from the point of view of the morpho-semantic means employed, i.e. from the point of view of its explicit structure. This, of course, gives us the opportunity to show several manifestations of the extraordinary variety of linguistic structures, but above all to reflect on the interweaving - or rather the complementarity - of morphological means, and on the persistence of fundamental semantic-cognitive categories. Our aim is therefore to show that, particularly in a cognitively essential domain such as the aspectual-temporal system, the semasiological and onomasiological perspectives presuppose each other, within the incessant dialectic between the use of linguistic coding (at the level of explicit grammar) and the exploitation of speakers' inexhaustible inferential capacity (at the pragmatic level).