More Like this

1. Genuinely Tenseless: encoding time in Cantonese

   Lee, Tommy Tsz-Ming; Pancheva, Roumyana; Zubizarreta, Maria Luisa (December 2022, Linguistic Society of America)

   Starr, John R; Kim, Juhyae; Oney, Burak (Ed.)

   Languages without overt marking of tense have been commonly analyzed as having covert tense, either in the form of a phonologically null tense morpheme or a post-LF semantic rule. We argue that the notion of (neo-Reichenbachian) tense is not only unnecessary for the analysis of Cantonese, but also falls short of accounting for temporal reference in this language. Following Pancheva & Zubizarreta (2020, to appear) on Paraguayan Guarani, we propose an analysis of Cantonese that manipulates the temporal parameter of the evaluation context in lieu of tense. A more general contribution of this line of work is the proposal that tense is not a semantic universal. 

   more » « less
2. No tense: temporality in the grammar of Paraguayan Guarani

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-023-09387-0  

   Pancheva, Roumyana; Zubizarreta, Maria Luisa (December 2023, Linguistics and Philosophy)

   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
3. Reanalyzing K’iche’ as a Tensed Language

   Maša Bešlin (October 2022, Proceedings of the 24th Workshop on American Indigenous Languages)

   Mayan languages have been claimed to lack the category Tense. Temporal interpretation is instead said to be guided by grammatical Aspect (see e.g. Larsen 1988 for K’iche’, Vázquez Álvarez 2002 for Chol, Bohnemeyer 2002 for Yucatec Maya, Coon 2016 for an overview, a.o.). In this paper, I examine the distribution and interpretation of the Tense/Aspect markers x- and k- in K’iche’, traditionally said to mark perfective (completive) and imperfective (incompletive) Aspect, respectively. I consider the co-occurrence possibilities of these markers with temporal adverbials (including temporal clauses), aspectual adverbials (‘in/for an hour’), the adverb na ‘still’, and individual level predicates. The evidence converges on the conclusion that the K’iche’ prefixes x- and k- mark (past and non-past) Tense rather than Aspect. The analysis is also shown to make the correct predictions for temporal matching in embedded clauses. Finally, I consider some uses of k- in past contexts and conclude that they are best seen as instances of the narrative present. 

   more » « less
4. Past-as-Past in counterfactual desire reports: a view from Japanese

   https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v1i0.5345  

   Mizuno, Teruyuki; Kaufmann, Stefan (December 2022, Semantics and Linguistic Theory)

   The semantic contribution of Fake Past in counterfactual expressions has been actively debated in recent semantic literature. This study deepens our current understanding of this natural language phenomenon by digging into the behavior of Past tense in Japanese counterfactual desire reports. We show that  the Past-as-Past approach to Fake Past makes correct predictions about its semantic behavior. 

   more » « less
5. AutoAspect: Automatic Annotation of Tense and Aspect for Uniform Meaning Representations

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.law-1.4  

   Chen, Daniel; Palmer, Martha; Vigus, Meagan (January 2021, Proceedings of The Joint 15th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW) and 3rd Designing Meaning Representations (DMR) Workshop)

   Claire Bonial, Nianwen Xue (Ed.)

   We present AutoAspect, a novel, rule-based annotation tool for labeling tense and aspect. The pilot version annotates English data. The aspect labels are designed specifically for Uniform Meaning Representations (UMR), an annotation schema that aims to encode crosslingual semantic information. The annotation tool combines syntactic and semantic cues to assign aspects on a sentence-by-sentence basis, following a sequence of rules that each output a UMR aspect. Identified events proceed through the sequence until they are assigned an aspect. We achieve a recall of 76.17% for identifying UMR events and an accuracy of 62.57% on all identified events, with high precision values for 2 of the aspect labels. 

   more » « less