In French and numerous other languages, there are certain noun phrases (NP’s) built around a noun coming from the commercial sphere, but which strike, whoever looks closer at them, as odd. I am thinking of NP’s like un prix cher, un loyer bon marché, a cheap price, un affitto caro, etc. Are these really, from a semantic point of view, correctly construed? In this article I analyse this question and try to give an answer to it.

Apart from verbs, languages possess morphemes which are related to time without this connection being obvious to the speakers or felt by them. Such is the case of the articles, certain prepositions, conjunctions and particles. In the present article, I analyse particularly the indefinite and definite articles. These create a sequence that actualises a noun and then reactualises it, giving it thereby a past. Thus, I describe actualisation with the help of articles, but I also take up to discussion sequential and contextual actualisation. The examples I quote come mainly from French but, since actualisation is a general linguistic phenomenon, some of them represent languages which are structurally different from each other. The temporality rendered by the grammatical morphemes can express either past time or future time.