Tense aspect modality and evidentiality : crosslinguistic perspectives Introduction: On the gradience of TAM E categories Dalila Ayoun Agnès Celle and Laure Lansari A quantitative perspective on modality and future tense in French and German Annalena Hütsch The temporal uses of French devoir and Estonian pidama ( must ) Anu Treikelder and Marri Amon The competition between the present conditional and the prospective imperfect in French over the centuries: First results Jacques Bres Sascha Diwersy and Giancarlo Luxardo Evidentiality and the TAM systems in English and Spanish: A cognitive and cross linguistic perspective Juana I. Marín Arrese Expressing sources of information knowledge and belief in English and Spanish informative financial texts Marta Carretero and Yolanda Berdasco Gancedo Evidentiality and epistemic modality in Old Catalan: A diachronic cognitive approach to the semantics of modal verbs Andreu Sentí I think : An enunciative and corpus based perspective Graham Ranger Embedding evidence in Tagalog and German: On two types of evidentials Jennifer Tan and Johannes Mursell Questions as indirect speech acts in surprise contexts Agnès Celle Non finiteness complementation and evidentiality: The Lithuanian Accusativus cum Participio in a cross linguistic perspective Aurelija Usoniene Nigel Vincent The perfect in Avar and Andi: Cross linguistic variation among two closely related East Caucasian languages Samira Verhees The different grammars of event singularisation: A cross linguistic corpus study Eric Corre Phraseological usage patterns of past tenses: A corpus driven look on French passé composé and imparfait Oliver Wicher Path scales: Directed motion verbs prepositions and telicity in European Portuguese António José Rodriguez Leal Fátima Oliveira and Purificação Silvano After an introductory chapter that provides an overview to theoretical issues in tense aspect modality and evidentiality this volume presents a variety of original contributions that are firmly empirically grounded based on elicited or corpus data while adopting different theoretical frameworks. Thus some chapters rely on large diachronic corpora and provide new qualitative insight on the evolution of TAM systems through quantitative methods while others carry out a collostructional analysis of past tensed verbs using inferential statistics to explore the lexical grammar of verbs. A common goal is to uncover semantic regularities and variation in the TAM systems of the languages under study by taking a close look at context. Such a fine grained approach contributes to our understanding of the TAM systems from a typological perspective. The focus on well known Indo European languages (e.g. French German English Spanish) but also on less commonly studied languages (e.g. Hungarian Estonian Avar Andi Tagalog) provides a valuable cross linguistic perspective