How multiple past tenses divide the labor: The case of South Baffin Inuktitut

• Published in: Linguistics
• Main Authors: Hayashi, Midori, Oshima, David Y.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Walter de Gruyter GmbH 2015
• Subjects: Baffin; inuit; inuktitut
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ling-2015-0017; https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ling-2015-0017/pdf

Abstract It is a common perception that in languages having multiple past tenses with different remoteness specifications, the past tenses cover the entire past without a gap or overlap. This paper demonstrates that this way of looking at multiple-past tense systems is not appropriate for the system in South Baffin Inuktitut (a variety of the Inuit language). The dialect has at least four past tenses: recent, hodiernal, pre-hodiernal, and distant. We argue that the relation between the four tenses cannot be represented by a simple linear scheme for two reasons. First, the pre-hodiernal past has a special status as the “conventionally designated alternative”, which is chosen in cases of remoteness indeterminacy, analogous to, for example, the Russian masculine gender being used in cases of gender indeterminacy. Second, there is overlap in their coverage. The pre-hodiernal and hodiernal past tenses collectively cover the entire past and thus any past situation can be described with one of them. The other two provide means to make more fine-grained and subjective temporal specifications. Comparison will be made between the system in South Baffin Inuktitut and those in some Bantoid languages which have been pointed out in the literature to have a comparable layered system of tenses.