This book examines the interactions between the morphosyntax and the semantic interpretation of tense and aspect in the Germanic and Romance languages. These languages diverge not only in their variety of tense and aspectual forms, but also in the distribution and interpretation of given forms. Adopting Noam Chomsky's minimalist framework, Alessandra Giorgi and Fabio Pianesi attempt to provide theoretical explanations for the observed patterns of form and meaning which link the morphosyntactic properties of languages in both universal and language-particular constraints on interpretation.