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Title: No tense: temporality in the grammar of Paraguayan Guarani
Paraguayan Guarani does not overtly mark tense in its inflectional system. Prior accounts of languages without obligatory morphological tense have posited a phonologically covert lexical tense, or have introduced tense semantics via a rule, in the post-syntactic interpretative component. We offer a more radical approach: Paraguayan Guarani does not have tense at the level of lexical or logical semantics. We propose that evaluation time shift, a mechanism independently attested in the narrative present in languages with tense, is more widely used in Paraguayan Guarani for encoding temporal meaning. The broader consequence of our proposal is that tense is not a linguistic universal.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1917619
PAR ID:
10529724
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Publisher / Repository:
Springer
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Linguistics and Philosophy
Volume:
46
Issue:
6
ISSN:
0165-0157
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1329 to 1391
Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
Tenselessness · evaluation time shift · narrative present · linguistic universals · Paraguayan Guarani
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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