Tense across Languages

267 Pages·2011·1.9 MB·English

by  Renate Musan

Linguistische
541
Arbeiten
Herausgegeben von Klaus von Heusinger, Gereon Müller,
Ingo Plag, Beatrice Primus, Elisabeth Stark und Richard Wiese

Renate Musan, Monika Rathert (Eds.)
Tense across Languages
De Gruyter
ISBN 978-3-11-026611-5
e-ISBN 978-3-11-02702-0
ISSN 0344-6727
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Table of contents

Renate Musan & Monika Rathert
Tense across Languages – an Introduction.............................................................................1

A. TENSE, MOOD, AND MODALITY
Eva-Maria Remberger
Tense and Volitionality..........................................................................................................9
Magdalena Schwager
Imperatives and Tense..........................................................................................................37
Anastasia Giannakidou
(Non)veridicality and Mood Choice: Subjunctive, Polarity, and Time................................59

B. UNDERSTUDIED TENSE PHENOMENA AND TYPOLOGICAL VARIATION
Cheng-Fu Chen
Use and Temporal Interpretation of the Rukai Future Tense...............................................91
Julia Landgraf
Tense in the Scottish Gaelic Verbal System.......................................................................109
Michael Rödel
New Perspectives on Double Perfect Constructions in German........................................127

C. TENSE IN TENSELESS LANGUAGES AND SEQUENCE-OF-TENSE PHENOMENA
Maria Bittner
Time and Modality without Tenses or Modals...................................................................147
Katharina Haude
Tense Marking on Dependent Nominals in Movima.........................................................189
Judith Tonhauser
The Paraguayan Guaraní Future Marker –ta: Formal Semantics and Cross Linguistic
Comparison........................................................................................................................207
Hamida Demirdache & Oana Lungu
Zero-Tense vs. Indexical Construals of the Present in French L1......................................233

Index..................................................................................................................................257

Renate Musan & Monika Rathert

Tense across Languages – an Introduction

1. Introduction

Tense is a well-studied issue in linguistics. Nevertheless, it tackles on so manifold issues,
dimensions of language, and phenomena that every now and then a fresh look at it is
advisable. The present volume aims at providing such a new look by illuminating the field
from different perspectives, across languages as well as across phenomena.
According to traditional grammars, tense relates the situation described in a clause with
respect to the time of speech. Reichenbach (1947) showed that this view is too simple; in
his account tense constructions relate three times to each other: the time of speech (S), the
time of the event (E), and the reference time (R), i.e. the time from which the clause
situation is looked at. The English simple past, for instance, is analyzed as follows: R is
located before S, and E ist located at R. And in the past perfect, E and R differ: R is before
S, and E is before R. In Reichenbach’s tense theory, the third crucial time, the reference
time, was thus part of the tense semantics.
This being a widespread view of tense, there is also a common notion of aspect: Aspect
is a grammaticalized verbal category that refers to the internal temporal structure of
situations. Roughly speaking, perfective aspect looks at a (completed) situation in its
totality where its internal temporal structure is not analyzed. Imperfective aspect looks at a
situation as consisting of phases, e.g. a beginning phase or an end phase. The English
progressive (or continuous) form expresses a subtype of imperfective aspect; it expresses
the progress of a situation relative to a certain point in time.
Later versions of three-time-theories modified the view of Reichenbach on tense. Thus,
Klein (1992, 1994) related three times to each other but integrated aspect into this system,
or – to view it from another angle – split up the functions of the three times between tense
and aspect. According to him, tense relates the topic time (very roughly corresponding to
Reichenbach’s reference time), i.e. the time the speaker talks about, with regard to the time
of speech, but aspect relates the time of the clause situation with regard to the topic time.
Applied to the English simple past and past perfect, this amounts to the following: the
simple past tense locates the topic time of its clause before the time of speech, while the
perfective aspect, which is associated with the simple form, locates the situation time at the
topic time. Similarly, because of the past component, the past perfect also locates the topic
time before the time of speech, but the perfect aspect locates the situation time before the
topic time. Hence, the situation time of the clause is not directly located by tense but
indirectly. It is thus not surprising that tense is often not looked at alone but together with
aspect.
Another category that plays an important role in the context of tense interpretation is
modality. Modal expressions indicate the attidude of the speaker towards the proposition.
Modality occurs in different flavours (deontic, epistemic, among others). Deontic inter-
2 Musan & Rathert
pretations of modals (expressing notions like duty or obligation) evaluate a proposition
according to some moral code. Epistemic interpretations of modals comment on the degree
to which the speaker is committed to the truth of the proposition. Modality is expressed
with different linguistic means, one of them being modal auxiliaries, another being verbal
inflection, i.e. mood. Both modal auxiliaries and mood interact with tense, and some
linguistic devices carry both modal and temporal meaning components.
Hence, tense, aspect, and modality – and especially mood – are often described as
complexes of relations that hinge together in one way or another. Some branches of the
relevant literature treat the interaction of tense and aspect (Hopper (1982), Comrie (1985),
Bybee and Dahl (1989), Dahl (2000), and others); some deal with the interaction of tense
and modality (cf. Diewald (1993), Abraham (2008), among others); and some describe the
whole tense-aspect-mood or TAM systems of languages as interrelated systems (cf.
Abraham and Janssen (1989), Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca (1994), among others).

2. Tense and Modality

As is widely known, modal verbs are polyfunctional in the sense that they express both
tense and modality (e.g., He will leave expresses both a future event (tense) and the
probability of this event (epistemic modality)). The semantic theory of modals has been
strongly influenced by Kratzer (1991); according to her, modals introduce alternative
worlds which are evaluated against a conversational background (modal base). In this
volume, three papers deal with the issues of tense and modality.
In her paper “Tense and Volitionality”, Eva Remberger analyzes several kinds of shift
phenomena related to tense in general and to the time-relational organisation of volitional
modal constructions with the modal verb want and its equivalents in other languages,
abbreviated WANT, in particular. Among the modal verbs, WANT, the verb encoding
volitionality, has often been shown to be an exception for several reasons, depending on the
morphosyntactic and semantic properties of the language at issue. WANT shows a so called
future shift, i.e. it undergoes a grammaticalization process towards a future auxiliary, which
is found in languages like Romanian, Greek and also English. WANT also shows an
evidential shift; restricted to German, this shift consists of an evidential interpretation of
WANT in certain time-relational configurations. Remberger analyzes both shifts by
adopting a compositional semantic analysis that takes a biclausal structure with two
temporal relations for each clause as the basic template for all types of modal constructions.
Magdalena Schwager analyzes in her paper “Imperatives and tense” the temporal
properties of imperatives. Schwager argued already in her dissertation (Schwager (2006))
for a semantic analysis of imperatives in terms of a modal operator ImpMod, in a Kratzer-
style modal semantics. In this paper, she demonstrates that the modal analysis of
imperatives helps to account for tense in imperatives. The covert imperative modal is in
complementary distribution with overt modals and has a performative interpretation. As a
consequence of this performative interpretation, imperatives lack a truth value. Schwager
shows that, contrary to the common opinion, imperatives are not restricted to future
Tense across Languages – an Introduction 3

reference. In present tense imperatives, the event time is only required not to be properly
past. German and English keep this requirement, even if the tense time is shifted by a
speech report. In contrast, Dutch counterfactual imperatives require precedence with
respect to the shifted tense time. Schwager also discusses present perfect imperatives in
German that are used to express wishes.
Anastasia Giannakidou’s paper “(Non)veridicality and mood choice: subjunctive,
polarity, and time” investigates the lexical parameters determining the choice of
subjunctive in Greek. Giannakidou shows that the Greek subjunctive involves two syntactic
positions: one is the position of the verb form, where a perfective non-past (PNP) appears;
the other is a higher particle na which is generated as a mood head. She examines the
distribution of na+PNP in complement clauses, adjunct clauses, and uses of it under
negation and in relative clauses (known as “polarity” subjunctives). Most importantly, she
shows that there is a correlation between polarity item licensing and subjunctive clauses in
Greek, suggesting that the same property is regulating both. Building on earlier work
(Giannakidou (1998), Giannakidou (1999)), she proposes that this property is
nonveridicality: verbs selecting the indicative are veridical, and those selecting the
subjunctive are nonveridical.

3. Understudied Tense Phenomena and Typological Variation

The three categories tense, aspect, and mood are realized differently in the languages of the
world. In languages like English or German, tense is realized morphosyntactically in the
verb complex. In languages like English, but not German, aspect is realized
morphologically on the verb, too. Mood on the other hand is clearly realized on the verb in
German. Other languages, like Chinese, do not even realize tense on the verb. Moreover,
individual languages mark different tense relations while leaving out others.
From the point of view of language typology, the most common tenses that are overtly
expressed are past, future, and perfect (cf. Dahl (1985), Bybee and Dahl (1989)). In the
majority of cases, the present tense is morphologically unmarked. Often, tense combines
with aspect; the most common kinds of aspect are progressive, imperfective, perfective.
Tense may be expressed either by periphrastic or by inflectional expressions.
Typologically, perfect and progressive have a very strong tendency for periphrastic
expressions, while past, imperfective and perfective prefer the inflectional variant. Future
does not show such a preference.
While certain languages, especially many European languages, are well studied, other
languages are notoriously understudied. This leads to a biased picture, and therefore, it is
important to have a look at the understudied languages, and especially on their expression
of tense. In this volume, this is done by Chen, who looks at the Austronesian language
Rukai, and by Landgraf, who studies Scottish Gaelic.
Cheng-Fu Chen analyzes the future of a less studied language in “Use and temporal
interpretation of the Rukai future tense”. Rukai is an Austronesian language spoken in the
southern and southeastern parts of Taiwan, which include Kaohsiung, Pingtung and Taitung