Pronouns: temporal paradigms

[Dan Everett]

Matthew,

Thanks for these examples. I wasn't aware of them. I know that Guarani
has some tense marking on nouns, but I cannot remember the exact
details. They are probably in Jorge Suarez's grammar and I was going to
be looking at that, but I also know that the Guarani facts are unlike
the Wari facts. Tupi-Guarani languages do have a '4th person' pronoun
which can involve tense or discourse focus (reminiscent of 'obviative').
Aryon Rodrigues describes one manifestation of that, in Tupinamba, in
his chapter of Doris Payne's Amazonian Linguistics.

-- Dan

.........................
Dan Everett
Professor of Phonetics and Phonology
Department of Linguistics
Arts Building
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
M13 9PL
Manchester, UK
dan.everett at man.ac.uk
Phone: 44-161-275-3158
Dept. Fax and Phone: 44-161-275-3187
http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de

-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion List for ALT [mailto:LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG]
On Behalf Of Matthew Dryer
Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2003 1:28 AM
To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Subject: Re: Pronouns: temporal paradigms


This isn't exactly what Dan was asking for, but Cebuano has a set of
demonstrative words that function as predicates and that vary for four
possible values of distance, based on the four possible combinations of
+/-near speaker, +/-near hearer, which also vary for tense (past vs.
present vs. future), with meanings like "X is here".  They are also used
in combination with locative expressions to predicate location.  Thus
"He is in Manila" will employ the appropriate demonstrative word (such
as the one for not near speaker and not near hearer, if neither of them
is in Manila). Interestingly, verbs in Cebuano do not vary for tense, so
these demonstrative words are clearly not verbs (although they occur in
the predicate position in which verbs appear).  This set of words also
includes three interrogative words, one for each tense (e.g. "Where was
he?")  See Wolff (1966: 42) for details.

Wolff, John V. 1966.  Beginning Cebuano, Part 1.    New Haven: Yale
University Press.

Matthew Dryer