Tense, aspect and mood are fundamental grammatical categories of the verb and have long constituted a central domain of investigation in Romance linguistics. The field is at once classical and innovative: while there already exists a substantial body of research on TAM phenomena in the Romance languages, ongoing methodological and theoretical developments continually open up new perspectives for their study. Moreover, since natural languages are constantly undergoing change, familiar phenomena often invite renewed scrutiny.

For instance, tense forms such as the imperfect or the synthetic and analytic future are increasingly developing modal functions (see Dessì Schmid 2010; Rodríguez Rosique 2024). In many Romance languages, the analytic perfect is undergoing grammaticalization in the form of an aoristic drift (Squartini & Bertinetto 2000; referential drift in Müller 2023). Approaches grounded in cognitive linguistics and construction grammar offer promising theoretical frameworks for reinterpreting the use of the subjunctive (cf. Radatz 2024). From a methodological point of view, discourse-oriented approaches have gained prominence, focusing on how the semantics of tense, aspect, and mood evolve in context and across different discourse types (Müller 2023; Egetenmeyer, Dessì Schmid & Becker 2024). Finally, corpus linguistics and methods from artificial intelligence offer innovative tools for exploring TAM-related phenomena from new angles.