Die Kodierung der Vergangenheit im Deutschen und Italienischen: Tempora im Vergleich

German and Italian are characterized by a different number of past tenses: in German Perfekt, Präteritum and Plusquamperfekt; in Italian, passato prossimo, passato remoto, imperfetto, trapassato prossimo and trapassato remoto. This paper deals with the tenses of the “simple” past and examines differences and similarities in a corpus of business texts. While the German past tenses have been studied in detail,1 the Italian ones have received relatively little attention.2 The past tenses in German and in Italian are first presented primarily from a semanto-pragmatic perspective (paragraph 1 and paragraph 2). Then, the main differences and common features of the respective tense systems are worked out (paragraph 3). The description of the corpus (4) is followed by a detailed contrastive analysis (5). Finally, there is a detailed examination of the desemantisation of the tenses in specific contexts (6).