TAM-inflected nominals

[Rachel Nordlinger]

Hi,

Does anyone know of any languages in which clausal information such as
tense, aspect, mood or polarity is encoded on nominals or free pronouns
(either in place of, or in addition to marking on the verb)?

For example, in Pitta Pitta (Australia) core case markers distinguish
future and non-future tenses (Blake 1987:59), so that argument and (some)
adjunct nominals carry tense information along with that carried by the
verb.  In Kayardild (Australia) (Evans 1985) all non-subject dependents of
a verb carry modal case marking (usually in addition to their regular case
marking) which carries tense/mood information for the clause.  This modal
case interacts with the tense/mood marking on the verb but, crucially, is
not identical to it so can't be analysed as simple copying.

Such examples need not be related to case marking. For example, pronouns in
Hausa distinguish various types of aspect (Kraft and Kirk-Greene 1973), and
pronouns in Supyire appear to distinguish declarative and non-declarative
mood (Carlson 1994).

I am also aware of examples of this type of phenomenon in Gurnu, Baagandji,
Yag Dii and Iai.  If anyone knows of examples in any other languages I
would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you,

Rachel


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Dr. Rachel Nordlinger
Dept. of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
University of Melbourne
Victoria 3010
AUSTRALIA
ph. +61-(0)3-9344-4215, fax. +61-(0)3-9344-8990