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THE TEMPORAL INTERPRETATION OF NOUN PHRASES
Judith Tonhauser
Stanford University
Friday, April 1, 3:30PM MJH Rm 126
Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center/Mellon Foundation
Graduate Research Program
A widespread assumption in the linguistic literature is that temporal
information is
marked and interpreted only on verbs and verbal projections. For instance,
English
finite verbs can be marked for past or present tense ('The president
danced/dances'),
whereas no such marking exists for noun phrases like 'the president'. In my
dissertation
project, I challenge this assumption by examining languages which realize
and interpret
temporal morphology on noun phrases.
Nordlinger and Sadler 2004 (section 2) identify at least 20 languages which
have
nominal inflectional markers with a temporal meaning. They claim that these
markers
are "nominal (past/future) tenses" (i.e., the markers locate the time at
which the
noun phrase is interpreted), comparable to verbal past/future tenses (which
locate
the time at which the verb is interpreted). For example, the suffix '-kue'
of Paraguayan
Guarani is claimed to be a "nominal past tense": in (1a), where the noun is
unmarked,
the individual is the president at the time of the dancing, while in (1b),
where the noun
is marked with '-kue', the individual was a president in the past.
(1) a. Mburuvicha o-jeroky.
president he-dance
'The (current) president is
dancing.'
b. Mburuvicha-kue o-jeroky.
president-kue he-dance
'The former president (i.e., the
one who
was president in the
past) is
dancing.'
In the talk, I discuss data from a subset of the "nominal tense" languages,
including
Guarani (Tupi-Guarani, Paraguay), Movima (unclassified, Bolivia), and
Somali (Cushitic,
Africa). I argue that it is misleading to call the nominal markers of
these languages "tenses"
because their meanings are rather different from the meaning of verbal
tense. Rather, the
temporal meanings encoded include aspect, (human) non-existence,
spatio/temporal
distance to the speaker, and distance of mention in the discourse context.
I propose that
different sets of semantic categories (e.g., tense, aspect, existence,
spatio/temporal
distance) are relevant for the temporal interpretation of verbs and noun
phrases, respectively.
I also address how languages without nominal temporal markers (e.g.,
English) convey the
meanings that are encoded by the nominal temporal markers.
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