Abstract

Every grammatical category is expressed by means of linguistic forms that contract binary relationships between themselves. Since they relate to the same phenomenon, the description of each pair of elements should not be the starting point of the research, for it firstly requires signalling a basic cognitive process that leads the speaker into the choice of one of the members of the opposition. It is only by adopting such a principle that we can reckon the importance of deductive parameters in the meaning of those forms. The current paper deals with doublets from the verbal, nominal and adjectival domains and it supposes a briefly reflection on the repercussions of these on tense, aspect, modality, as well as on entities linked to states and events.

Key Words: markedness; by default; binarism; duality; salience