A propos de l’usage de l’imperfectif dans la narration de sequences d’evenements en tcheque

In this paper the Author deals with the usage of verbal aspect in narrated sequences of events in Czech. Particular attention is given to the so-called “contextually conditioned imperfective past” (Dickey 2000). A corpus based analysis points out that two kinds of contexts are possible: (i) the events can partially overlap, (ii) they are in strict sequenciality. A comparison is made with the so-called temporal zeugma in French. The conclusion provides a brief contrastive analysis of the way the Czech scheme is translated to several Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages.