Describing future eventualities in Tlingit ...

• Main Author: Cable, Seth
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Semantic Fieldwork Methods 2019
• Subjects: Yukon; tlingit; Alaska
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/sfm.v1i2.191725; https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/storyboards/article/view/191725

This paper details two storyboards —"Hawaii Trip" and "Imagining the Future"—which are designed to help investigate the way a given language does (or does not) mark predicates describing eventualities that take place in the future. I describe two studies employing these storyboards with a speaker of the Tlingit language (Na-Dene; Alaska, British Columbia, Yukon). In prior literature, it has been claimed that a verb in Tlingit does not require special future tense marking in order to describe a future eventuality (Leer 1991). However, it has proven difficult to confirm such uses of non-future-marked verbs in regular elicitation sessions with native speakers. Through use of these two storyboards with a gifted Tlingit story-teller, it was found that some narrators do indeed use non-future-marked verbs to describe eventualities that are understood to take place in the future. However, various contextual clues—including metalinguistic comments made by the narrator himself—-suggest that such usage may reflect a ... : Semantic Fieldwork Methods, Vol 1 No 2 (2019) ...