Tense marking on NPs

[W. Schulze]

Dear colleagues,

please allow me to forward you a question that has been sent to me by
Roland Hemmauer. Roland is not yet a member of the Lingtyp forum.
Best regards,
Wolfgang
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Roland Hemmauer (roland.hemmauer at gmx.de) wrote:

Dear LingTyp members,

as I am currently writing my M.A. thesis about tense marking on NPs
in Tupi-Guaranian languages of Lowland South America, I would like
to learn whether there are any other languages of the world that ex-
hibit the same or a similar phenomenon.

In order to sketch the problem briefly, I shall give the following
example taken from Paraguayan Guarani:

   ka'a               r-ogue-kué-gui             o-jej-apo
hey'u  porã-rã
   yerba mate  LNK-leaf-PAST-ABL  3:S-PASS-make  tea      good-FUT

   "From the leaves of the yerba mate tree, a good tea can be made"

   (LNK = a linker indicating possessive relations on some nouns)

In this utterance, the 'leaves' are marked for past tense, as they will
be "ex-leaves" (leaves detached from their tree) once entering the pro-
cess of making tea. Conversely, the 'tea' is marked for future tense, as

it will be "future tea" only resulting from the production process. (The

verbal predicate itself is unmarked for tense in this example).

Virtually all Tupi-Guaranian languages share this ability to mark noun
phrases (NPs) for tense, (seemingly) independently from the tense mark-
ing occuring on the predicate, thus creating some notion of an internal
temporal structure of an event and of the exact temporal status of the
referential entities involved in it (formally, NPs).

My question, in a nutshell, is then:

Are there any other languages that have means to mark referential NPs
for tense, thus putting the referential entities represented by them
into their own temporal relations? If yes, what are the factors con-
ditioning this phenomenon? Possible questions include:

- syntactic/semantic scope of nominal tense marking? (e.g. single noun,
   whole NP, possessive relation, whole utterance,...)

- syntactic/semantic restrictions on nominal tense marking? (e.g. sub-
   ject/object, S/A/O, core/periphery, (in-)alienability, human/animate/

   inanimate/mass/abstract,...)

- relations to the semantic content of the (verbal or other) predicate?
   (e.g. state/process/action, achievement, accomplishment,...)

- relations to the tense/aspect/mood of the predicate? (e.g. past/pre-
   sent/future as a reference point, perfective/imperfective, negation,
   real vs. irreal, evidential,...)

- possible by-functions of the formal means of marking nominal tense?
   (e.g. derivation of collective or instrumental nouns, aspect marking,

   case marking,...)

Up to the moment, I am only aware of the notion of 'nominal aspect' (in-

dividual vs. mass nouns) and of the existence of a so-called 'modal case

system' in Kayardild, a language of Australia. Yet, aspect and mood are
not what I'm primarily looking for. - The phenomenon in question should
function as tense in the first place (in the sense of locating an enti-
ty in time relative to a temporal reference point).

It should be added that I don't mean a system of "floating" tense mark-
ing here, where genuine verbal tense markers can be attached also to NPs
in order to mark focus (as also found in Paraguayan Guarani), nor a
system of tense concord, where other constituents of a sentence must
agree in tense with the verb (e.g. adverbial temporal concord as found
in Malagasy).

Thank you very much in advance for your hints to languages that share
this phenomenon! If it is customary to post a summary to the list, I
shall do so once I have collected a reasonable number of answers.

Kind regards
Roland Hemmauer
IATS / Univ. Munich
roland.hemmauer at gmx.de

********************************************
--
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze
Institut für Allgemeine und Typologische Sprachwissenschaft
Department 'Kommunikation und Sprachen' (Dep. II) - F 13/14
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1
D-80539 München
Tel.: ++49(0)89-2180-2486 (Sekr.) / -5343 (Büro)
Fax: ++49(0)89-2180-5345
Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Web: http://www.ats.uni-muenchen.de/wschulze