1It is almost a truism that the capacity to define and recognize boundaries is fundamentally important to human perception and cognition: We are able to identify things because we perceive them as different from each other and from their surroundings. Thus, it does not come as a surprise that the concept of boundaries has come to occupy a central role in Cognitive Linguistics. Langacker, one of the founders of this line of linguistic research, extensively discusses this concept in several of his works (1987: 151-152, 1991: 63ff., 2008: 136ff.). He highlights that the objects and processes humans perceive and talk about can be construed as either continuous or discrete, depending on whether they are bounded or unbounded within a given domain. Accordingly, in bounding, “there is some notion of reaching the limits of a single instance, making it possible to begin the conception of another distance instance” (Langacker 2008: 137). Consequently, “a thing is bounded when there is some limit to the set of constitutive entities” (Langacker 2008: 136, emphasis in the original). From Langacker’s point of view (2008: 137-138) there are three factors that allow speakers to recognize objects or processes as bounded entities: contrast with surroundings, internal configuration, and the function of the count noun referent. He also underlines that boundaries are not necessarily perceived by the speaker as being accurately traced but may appear fuzzy (ibid.: 138).

2Despite its high degree of abstraction, the notion of bounding has an intuitive plausibility when applied, for example, to count nouns: “For many count nouns, the profiled thing is bounded in the straightforward sense of having a discernible boundary. A lake, for example, is a body of water bounded in all directions by land. Moreover, its boundary – the line delimiting water and land – gives it a particular shape (ibid.)”. In these cases, the concept seems almost self-evident. However, as soon as the concept is applied to nonspatial domains and used to define abstract entities, things get more complex because no spatial boundaries can be identified in, for example, time spans (an hour, a minute etc.), football matches, or for the alphabet. This does not impede speakers who can still perceive these entities or situations as bounded but only in a metaphorical way – that means relative to domains other than space. For example, both the count noun/mass noun distinction and deverbal nominalizations can be traced back to the principle of boundedness (cf. Langacker 1987: 197): While diamond or beer present physical substances without spatial limitations, the same lexemes refer to bounded and countable entities when in their plural forms (diamonds, beers) or used with the article a (a diamond, a beer). In a similar way, to dance construes a dynamic process without taking account its limitations in time, while a dance portrays the same process as a bounded, “thing-like” entity. Conversely, Talmy (2000) describes the semantic transformation that occurs when count nous such as shrub and panel are equipped with the suffixes -ery and –ing (shrubbery, paneling) as debounding.

3Further, Langacker also uses the concept to contrast perfective and imperfective processes as coded in verb lexemes (Langacker 2008: 85-91). According to him (ibid.: 86) “a perfective process portrays a situation as changing through time, while an imperfective process describes the extension through time of a stable situation”. Hence, verbs such as jump, kick, learn, explode, or cook are classified as perfectives, whereas verbs like resemble, have, know, want, or like can be ranged as imperfectives due to their inherent semantic value. The central claim Langacker (ibid.: 87) makes is “that the perfective/imperfective and count/mass distinctions are precisely identical, when due allowances are made for the intrinsic difference between verbs and nouns”. This implies that the properties identified to distinguish count and mass nous – namely homogeneity, expansibility, bounding, and replicability – can also be applied to explain the contrast between perfective and imperfective processes (ibid.: 87-88): “A perfective process is so called because it is bounded, i.e. its endpoints are included within the scope of predication in the temporal domain. No such specification of bounding is made for an imperfective process; it profiles a stable situation that may extend indefinitely far beyond the scope of predication in either direction […].” In a similar vein, Cappelle and Declerk (2005: 889) define boundedness as “an aspectual notion, which has to do with whether or not an event is represented as coming to an end”. It follows that the notion of boundedness describes a highly abstract conceptual category that seems to structure a broad range of different linguistic and conceptual configurations. In line with this, Bybee (1985: 152) uses the term of boundedness as a basis for establishing inflectional aspect as a grammatical category:

When aspect is defined as distinguishing different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation, it clearly qualifies as a grammatical category of cross-linguistic significance. Moreover, the particular contrast expressed in this category when it is inflectional are cross-linguistically significant. Thus it is possible to give an even more specific definition to inflectional aspect, as expressing one or both of the following two contrasts: that between a bounded or limited situation and an unbounded or in progress situation, and that between an habitually-occurring and a merely continuing situation.

4In fact, research on aspectuality (particularly in Romance languages) has extensively relied on the metaphor of boundaries (although most authors do not explicitly refer to the notion of bounding as defined by Langacker). Dessì Schmid’s delimitation principle (2014, 2019, this volume) is one example of approaches to aspectuality that are fully compatible with cognitive linguistic research on bounding. While there is no consensus on whether aspect is a grammatical category in Romance languages, it’s generally agreed upon that aspectuality – understood here in the largest sense as the temporal structure of states, events, or situations – “is a matter of ‘boundaries’” (Sasse 2002: 201; compare also Smith 2012: 2584). According to Sasse (ibid.), temporal stages (often referred to as phases or intervals), as well as commonly used aspectual labels such as telic and atelic, can ultimately be reduced to the metaphorical notion of boundaries in time:

The basic distinction is that between unbounded and bounded situations: situations may be conceived of as including their starting points or endpoints or both, or may be conceived of as persistent situations with no boundaries implied. Common concepts such as “phases”, “intervals”, “telic vs. atelic situations”, etc. derive from the metaphor of boundaries […]. The basic component of any theory of aspect is thus concerned with the modeling of the linguistic encoding of situations with respect to their boundaries.

5Boundedness is directly linked to the notion of an aspectual viewpoint, which refers to the fact that a situation can be linguistically coded as accomplished and thus bounded in time (perfective viewpoint), or as ongoing and therefore unbounded in time (imperfective viewpoint). Smith (2012: 2587) compares the aspectual viewpoint with the lens of a camera that may focus a particular object within its boundaries, whereas the other elements of the scene become/get blurred, thus unbounded:

Aspectual viewpoints are salient in many languages of the world. They focus a situation like the lens of a camera. As the camera lens makes a scene available, so viewpoint makes semantically visible all or part of the situation expressed in a sentence. The visible information is available for pragmatic inference. (The terms ‘grammatical aspect’ or […] ‘outer aspect’ are also used in the literature.) Viewpoints are usually expressed by overt morphemes, for instance, the progressive auxiliary be + ing in English (Joan is swimming) or by inflections, such as the imparfait in French (Joan nageait). The key feature of an aspectual viewpoint is whether it makes visible an unbounded, ongoing situation or a closed, bounded one. Imperfective viewpoints are of the former category; perfective viewpoints of the latter.

6In addition to this traditional dichotomy (the imperfective and the perfective viewpoint), Smith (2012: 2587) adds a third kind of aspectual value, which she calls the neutral viewpoint. According to Smith (ibid.) the neutral viewpoint “allows either bounded or unbounded interpretation; this is the ‘zero-marked’ case, when no overt viewpoint morpheme appears”. Following her approach, this type of viewpoint appears in French (and other Romance languages) in the present and the future tense (cf. Smith 1991: 263-267). Hence, sentences like Jean mange une pomme ‘John is eating an apple’ or Jean aime Marie ‘John loves Mary’ can be analyzed as unbounded, open situations. By contrast, these open readings get lost in particular syntactic contexts, for example when followed by a temporal subordinate clause introduced by quand ‘when’: Marie sourit toujours quand Paul arrive à la maison ‘Mary always smiles when Paul gets home’. This once again shows that aspectual values, such as un/boundedness or im/perfectivity, depend on context and the syntactic surroundings of the verb and can only be analyzed by considering the interaction between various factors (such as adverbs, verbal periphrases, types of action (Aktionsarten)), etc. (cf. Haßler 2016; De Miguel 2000). For example, Capelle & Declerck (2005) show that certain prepositions, particles, and adverbs in English can be used to present directed motion events as temporally bounded or unbounded.

7Finally, some recent publications in the field of second language acquisition and teaching have discussed how the concept of bounding can be applied to second language acquisition and teaching, in particular to grammar instruction (cf. Niemeier (2013) for English, as well as Doiz (2013) and Jansen (2013) for Romance languages).

8These examples illustrate that the bounded/unbounded distinction pervades both language structure and use and can thus be considered to be a fundamental category in language and cognition. Taken in this abstract sense, the notion of bounding seems promising in order to get a deeper understanding of the conceptual content of a broad range of different linguistic units and categories and their relationship to fundamental perceptual structures. However, the concept remains strangely understudied and is applied in a rather heterogenous way, usually to descriptions of specific phenomena in different languages. This has made some researchers doubt its explanatory power and usefulness: “[…] dans la majorité des analyses linguistiques concernant les phénomènes aspecto-temporels, la notion de borne ne reçoit pas un traitement unifié. En effet, on s’aperçoit que cette notion fortement sollicitée pour établir une distinction entre situation bornée et non bornée, n’est pas clairement définie dans les descriptions. Si les généralisations concernant cette distinction apparaissent problématiques, c’est parce que les facteurs qui sont pris en compte pour la déterminer, sont fort variés” (Guentchéva 2001: 31).

9To date, relevant studies focus on only a restricted number of grammatical phenomena and a rather small range of different languages. Against this backdrop, the central aim of the present volume is to explore the potential of the concept of bounding by applying it to selected grammatical features that, until now, have barely been studied from this angle – among them, nominal expressions and presentative constructions. In addition, it hopes to broaden the debate, giving it a larger scale of different languages and language varieties (among them French-based Creoles). The three individual contributions are briefly presented below.

10In her paper “Universal Categories, Single Language Realizations: Aspectuality in French and other Romance Languages” Sarah Dessì Schmid analysis the semantic-functional category of aspectuality from a mainly theoretical point of view and on the basis of a new onomasiological, frame-theoretical model (cf. Dessì Schmid 2014: 2019). In contrast to more traditional approaches on aspectuality, claiming a strict distinction between grammatical aspect (called ‘viewpoint aspect’ by Smith (1991) and lexical aspect (also known as Aktionsarten or ‘situation aspect’ (Smith 1991)), Dessì Schmid takes a unidimensional perspective on this category. From this unidimensional point of view a differentiation based on formal criteria becomes almost irrelevant. In accordance with a current finding in cognitive semantics, Dessì Schmid identifies the delimitation principle as the key criterion for the description, analysis, and classification of aspectual information (cf. also Dessì Schmid 2019: 106). The focus of the article is on French, but the author underlines the model’s applicability to any natural language.

11In his paper entitled “Reference, Deixis and Perspective. Aspectual Readings of Italian Ecco- and French Voilà-Constructions” Felix Tacke provides a profound analysis of the aspectual properties of deictic-presentative constructions headed by Italian ecco and French voici/voilà. The main hypothesis consists in the assumption that deictic pointing elements behave in some respects like verbs (for example when used in combination with certain tense forms). According to the author, ecco as well as voici/voilà can locate a situation at the moment of speech and thus contribute to an imperfective, unbounded reading.

12To date, the concept of nominal bounding has not been applied at all to creole languages. Evelyn Wiesinger is filling this gap with her contribution “Probing the role of bounding and definiteness: Bare noun and determiner use in Guianese French Creole”. In this article, the author deals with the usability of nominal bounding to explain the system of determiners and bare nouns in Guiana French Creole. Starting from two central cognitive-semantic concepts - that of bounding and that of definiteness - Wiesinger explores the extent to which these are crucial for the marking of the nominal phrase in Guianese French. The contrastive comparison of languages such as English or French (which have a differentiated article system) makes it clear that for a comprehensive explanation of article use or the use of bare nouns in Guiana French Creole, pragmatic factors at the discourse level must also be included.