Aspect and Tense: [Revised version of a paper read at the Macquarie Language Colloquium of the 14 September (2001).]

Abstract

In 1998 at the age of 94, Giuliano Bonfante published a book that he had written in 1940. He was an Italian, educated in Italy, but he withdrew to Paris for his advanced studies and to Spain for his first academic posts where he founded 'Emerita'. he went on to Geneva and in 1939 sailed to America and a chair at Princeton. This was where he wrote a book ultimately published in English concerning the origin of the romance languages. Fifteen years later he left Princeton where he had helped to found 'Word', the journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York, to take up appointments successively at Genoa, Turin and finally in 1970 Rome, where in 1994 he published 'La Lingua parlata in Orazio' (Venosa), a revised edition of a book first published in Spanish in 1936 ('Los elementos populares en la lengua de Oracio'). He admitted to his daughter Larissa, by then a scholar in her own right, that he would love to see his 1940 book also published. She undertook the editing of it and published it with some changes.