26.1711, Sum: Morphology of tense across languages

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LINGUIST List: Vol-26-1711. Tue Mar 31 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.1711, Sum: Morphology of tense across languages

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Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2015 10:53:43
From: Ariel Cohen [gunardo.cohen at gmail.com]
Subject: Morphology of tense across languages

 
Dear all,
Some time ago, I posted a query entitles “Morphology of tense across
languages”:
---
Dear all, 
Does anyone know of a language where present tense is signaled by overt
morphology, while past/future is not? 
Thank you very much.
---
I received very helpful replies from the following people:
Martin Haspelmath 
Ivan Kapitonov 
Bruno Olsson 
Steve-Monica Parker 
Daniel Ross
Thank you so much!

Here is a brief summary of the replies:

1. Martin Haspelmath helpfully sent me his paper: 
Haspelmath, M. (1998). The semantic development of old presents: New futures
and subjunctives without grammaticalization. Diachronica, 15(1), 29-62.
In this paper he shows examples from Udmurt and Kannada, where the future is
more marked than the present (progressive).

2. Vanya Kaitonov pointed to me a discussion on Linguistics Stock Exchanges
http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/11355/can-present-tense-be-more
-marked
The gist of the discussion is that it is difficult to answer, because the
distinction beween tense and aspect is not always clear, and also because
there are languages with no clear present tense, just “non-past” or
“non-future”.
Most of the discussion is about languages where a non-present tense is not
unmarked, but has less “stuff”. 
But one possible candidate is Anii, where “the unmarked form isn't a present,
it's a past.”.

3. Bruno Olsson suggests a candidate language:
Marind (Papuan language of south New Guinea) is described by Drabbe (1955) as
having a present tense prefix Vp- (where V is gender agreement), and bare verb
forms giving Perfective Past:
ep-ano-kiparud-at (MASC.PRES-1sg-tie-DUR) ''I (male) am tying''
vs.
no-kiparud (1sg-tie) ''I tied'' 
>From p. 39, Drabbe, Petrus. 1955. Spraakkunst van het Marind.

4. Steve Parker suggests “ Michif, a native American language mixed with
French.”. He provides an interesting example, from an unknown source:
“[diminikwan] ‘I drink’
[timinikwan] ‘I drank’
In spite of this minimal pair, there is no need to posit a phonemic contrast
between /t/ and /d/ in this language.
As a matter of fact, all of the obstruents in verbal forms in this language
are voiceless at the underlying level.
The phonetic [d] here is the surface realization of an underlying sequence /n
- t/, where /n-/ is a prefix (probably a tense or aspect marker). These two
consonants fuse or merge together into the intermediate segment [d], which
preserves features of both. This is called coalescence”

5. Daniel Ross agrees that it is “Unlikely due to markedness.” He notes that
“one potential example is Arabic, where the past tense is the citation form of
the verb and the present involves a different structure.”
But warns that “ this is complicated because:
1. Arabic morphology is not concatenative; the triliteral root system uses
three consonants in various templates of vowels (and sometimes other
consonants) in addition to, sometimes, affixes. So determining what is
''bare'' or ''uninflected'' is tricky. But just the three consonants (with
minimal vowels inserted) is used for the citation form, which is 3SG.PAST.
2. This applies most obviously to uninflected 3SG, where in present tense
there is a prefix and in past tense there is not suffix.
3. One marker of this (equal in both tenses) may be that there are prefixes in
the present and suffixes in the past (for complicated historical reasons
probably to do with differences in VSO and SVO order).
4. It's not clear these are really tenses; they're possibly more properly
analyzed as aspects, although drawing a true distinction there is tricky.”

Thanks again to all who responded.

Ariel Cohen
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
 

Linguistic Field(s): Morphology
                     Typology



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