Contents -- Symbols -- Introduction -- 1. The Syntactic and Semantic Background -- 1.1. The syntactic framework -- 1.1.1. The Split-Infl hypothesis -- 1.1.2. Chomsky's minimalist approach -- 1.1.3. A few words on phrase structure -- 1.1.4. Syncretic categories and the Feature Scattering Principle -- 1.2. The semantic representation -- 1.2.1. Tenses as sentential operators -- 1.2.2. Temporal entities -- 1.2.3. Events -- 2. On the Italian, Latin, and Portuguese Temporal Systems -- 2.1. The temporal projection -- 2.2. The Italian system -- 2.3. The Latin system -- 2.4. The Portuguese system -- 2.5. On nominative case assignment -- Appendix: On the etymology of the Latin pluperfect and future perfect -- 3. The Present Perfect in Germanic and Romance -- 3.1. The morphosyntactic properties of the Germanic verbal systems -- 3.1.1. The morphosyntax of the English verbal system -- 3.1.2. Other Germanic languages -- 3.1.3. The position of negation -- 3.1.4. English modals again -- 3.1.5. On the present perfect puzzle -- 3.1.6. The simple past and the present perfect in Italian -- 3.2. The semantics of the present perfect -- 3.2.1. On the notion of consequent state -- 3.2.2. Some tentative speculations on the semantics of the present perfect and the simple past -- 3.2.3. A revision of the notion of consequent state -- 3.2.4. A compositional semantics for synthetic and analytic perfects -- 3.2.5. On the argumental status of temporal adverbials -- 3.2.6. The present perfect in English and MSc and temporal localizations -- 3.2.7. Toward an account of the present perfect puzzle -- 3.3. More on the present perfect in Italian-like languages -- 3.3.1. A note on Icelandic -- 3.3.2. The interpretation of the present perfect in Spanish and Catalon -- 3.3.3. The analysis of the Portuguese periphrastic present perfect.

3.4. Some observations on the temporal and aspectual properties of the Italian present perfect -- Appendix: The present perfect in Catanese and Vicentino -- 4. The Present and Imperfect in Germanic and Romance -- 4.1. The present tense -- 4.1.1. Crosslinguistic evidence -- 4.1.2. The structure of events -- 4.1.3. Punctuality and the properties of the speech event -- 4.1.4. A revised notion of punctuality -- 4.1.5. The present tense and perfectivity -- 4.2. On the present-in-the-past interpretation of embedded events in Germanic and Romance -- 4.2.1. The Italian imperfect: a characterisation -- 4.2.2. Comparative evidence -- 5. On the Semantics and Morphosyntax of the Italian Subjunctive -- 5.1 Toward a semantics of the subjunctive -- 5.1.1. The data -- 5.1.2. Previous accounts -- 5.1.3. Mood and modality -- 5.1.4. Mood in subordinate clauses -- 5.1.5. Factive predicates -- 5.1.6. Dream and its companions -- 5.1.7. Intralinguistic variations in mood choice -- 5.1.8. Other factors affecting mood choice -- 5.1.9. Concluding remarks -- 5.2. The morphosyntax of the Italian subjunctive -- 5.2.1. Syncretic categories and the Feature Scattering Principle -- 5.2.2. Subject-Verb inversion phenomena in Italian -- 5.2.3. The V-to-C solution -- 5.2.4. The syncretic category solution -- 5.2.5. Extraction from subjunctive clauses -- 5.2.6. Conclusions -- Appendix: Conditionals and counterfactuals -- 6. The Double Accessibility Reading in Italian and English -- 6.1. The Double Accessibility Reading -- 6.2. The Italian data -- 6.3. The English data -- 6.4. Conclusions -- References -- Author Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Z -- Subject Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W.