The expression of time is fundamental in communication and languages have developed a variety of means to encode temporal relations. When learning a new language, learners are often faced with the challenging task of discovering a new system of temporal relations. The present study investigates the development of tense and aspect marking in the interlanguage of L3 Italian learners enrolled in university language courses. It examines how the tense-aspect system develops in the interlanguage and how the acquisition process is shaped by factors such as the lexical aspectual value of the predicates and discourse grounding. The data indicate that both lexical aspect and discourse grounding influence the distribution of verbal morphology in the interlanguage. Semantically congruent pairings of lexical aspect, verbal morphology and discourse grounding are used more frequently and appropriately than less prototypical combinations. The acquisition process is also influenced by the learner's L1, which was mostly German in the context of the present study. The study can be used as a guide for curricular decisions in language teaching, and for projecting further research on the development of tense-aspect marking in multilingual learners.

This volume investigates the form of love letters and erotic letters in Greek and Latin up to the 7th Century CE, encompassing both literary and documentary letters (the latter inscribed and on papyrus), and prose and poetry. The potential for, and utility of treating this large and diverse corpus as a 'genre' is examined. To this end, approaches from ancient literary criticism and modern theory of genre are made; mutual influences between the documentary and the literary form are sought; and origins in proto-epistolary poetic texts are examined. In order to examine the boundaries of a form, limit cases, which might have less claim to the label 'love letter', are compared with more clear-cut examples. A series of case studies focuses on individual letters and letter-collections. Some case studies situate their subjects within the history and literary evolution of the love letter, using both intertextuality and comparative approaches; others placing them in their cultural and historical contexts, particularly uncovering the contribution of epistolarity to erotic discourse, and to the history of sexuality and gender in diverse eras and locations within Classical to Late Antiquity.