Tense marking on NPs

[Katharina Haude]

In Movima, an unclassified language of lowland Bolivia, past tense is 
marked within the NP, namely on the article or pronoun. (Future is marked 
by a particle in the VP, but there is no morphological tense marking on the 
verb itself at all.) Past-tense marking indicates that the referent is no 
longer in existence, so it basically has a scope over the NP only. Note the 
contrast between the unmarked neuter article _aj_ in (1) and the one marked 
for past tense, _oj_, in (2):

(1)
aj asna-y'Li
ART.ntr home-1excl
'our home'

(2)
oj asna-y'Li
ART.ntr.pst home-1excl
'our former home (which doesn't exist anymore)'.

However, nominal tense marking can also have a larger scope. In past-tense 
contexts it is the only grammatical indicator of past tense:

(3)
ilo:ni=y'Li n-oj chaMmo
walk=1excl OBL-ART.ntr.pst forest
'we walked in the forest'

Time stability, animacy and relevance of the referent play an important 
role. Nouns denoting non-human entities whose existence at the moment of 
speaking is not relevant are marked more easily for past tense than nouns 
with human referents (which is why the contrast is best seen on the neuter 
article). Furthermore, the main device for forming subordinate clauses in 
Movima is nominalization; the concept expressed by a deverbal noun is 
usually not time-stable, so the NP is easily marked for past tense:

(4)
n-oj iloni-wa-y'Li
OBL-ART.ntr.pst walk-NMZ-1excl
'when we walked (lit: "at our past-walking")'

By contrast, time-stable concepts are not marked for past tense even in 
past-tense contexts, as is shown by the unmarked article of the second NP 
in (5):

(5)
n-oj ayloba-wa-y'Li nosdé n-aj kolegiyo
OBL-ART.ntr.pst gather-NMZ-1excl over.there OBL-ART.ntr school
'when we gathered (lit. "at our past-gathering") over there at the school'

I hope that this has answered some of your questions.

Katharina




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Katharina Haude
Dept. of Linguistics, University of Nijmegen
P.O.Box 9103, 6525 HD Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Tel. ++31-24-3611216, Fax ++31-24-3611070