Tense-Aspect-Modality Issues in and Across Languages: With Special Emphasis on the Perfect

Tense, aspect and modality are important issues relevant both in and across languages – in contrastive and typological terms, and for linguists worldwide they have always been major and very special points of interest and research. In July 2024 and July 2025, Special Sessions entitled “TAM In and Across Languages” were organized and took place within Atiner’s 17th and 18th Annual International Conferences on Languages and Linguistics in Athens. They drew the attention of a group of linguists who made presentations on TAM, most of which later turned into research articles published by the Athens Journal of Philology. This article offers a summary of the two Special TAM Sessions within the perspective of current theoretical linguistics and an overview of three of the papers based on the conference presentations, authored by Shinian Wu (USA), Sema Kutsarova (Bulgaria), and Desislava Dimitrova (Bulgaria). Keywords: tense, aspect, modality, the Perfect, (non )cancellability, (non )witnessing, speaker ghosting, grammaticalization, pragmatic aspects of aspect