Toward the tenseless analysis of a tenseless language
In this paper, I argue, based on data from West Greenlandic, that languages can be truly tenseless, in the sense that their inflectional systems contain no node dedicated to the encoding of relations between speech time and reference time. My idea is that the burden of encoding temporal information...
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| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.459.2699 http://www.umass.edu/linguist/events/SULA/SULA_2003_cd/files/shaer2.pdf |
| Summary: | In this paper, I argue, based on data from West Greenlandic, that languages can be truly tenseless, in the sense that their inflectional systems contain no node dedicated to the encoding of relations between speech time and reference time. My idea is that the burden of encoding temporal information actually falls mostly on the VP rather than on tense; so that true tenselessness entails neither a radical indeterminacy in the temporal interpretation of tenseless sentences nor a radically different description of the linguistic properties of tensed and tenseless languages, as some have claimed. Inuit languages, including Greenlandic, Inuktitut, and Yup’ik, have been widely described as tenseless — that is, as having no temporal marking directly comparable to the tenses of, say, Germanic and Romance languages and as permitting sentences with no explicit temporal marking whatsoever. Despite this, most theoretical linguists who have |
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