basic clauses without tense-aspect marking

[David Gil]

Dear all,

I am writing to inquire whether anyone is familiar with a systematic 
cross-linguistic study examining whether or not languages allow for the 
possibility of basic (but non-telegraphic) clauses with no expression 
(either morphological or periphrastic) of tense-aspect. For example, 
whereas in most or all European languages, basic clauses must be marked 
for tense-aspect, in many or most Southeast Asian languages, such 
marking is optional.

(By "basic (non-telegraphic)" clauses, I mean to exclude things like 
small clauses, participial clauses, and other clause types that occur in 
specific syntactic environments, and also things such as newspaper 
headlines, which are associated with specific linguistic registers where 
brevity is at a premium.)

Although there have been numerous cross-linguistic studies of 
tense-aspect marking, by Östen Dahl, Matthew Dryer, Leon Stassen, and 
others, as far as I can recall (though I don't have access right now to 
most of the sources), none of these studies address this question 
directly. For example, Matthew Dryer's WALS chapter "Position of 
Tense-Aspect Affixes" contains a feature value "no tense-aspect 
inflection"; however, this differs from what I am looking for in the 
following two respects: (a) languages with tense-aspect inflection may 
make only optional use of it, eg., according to Dryer, Standard 
Indonesian; and (b) languages with no tense-aspect inflection may have 
obligatory periphrastic marking of tense-aspect — eg., if I'm not 
mistaken, Yoruba.

My impression is that there is a linguistic area extending from Mainland 
Southeast Asia through the Indonesian archipelago all the way to the New 
Guinea Birds Head (where I am now) in which optional tense-aspect 
marking is the norm; but I would like to know how widespread this is in 
other parts of the world (I suspect that it is not). So if anybody is 
familiar with examples of languages outside the above region which also 
permit basic (non-telegraphic) clauses without tense-aspect marking, 
please let me know, I'd be very grateful.

Thanks,

David

-- 
David Gil

Department of Linguistics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany

Telephone: 49-341-3550321 Fax: 49-341-3550119
Email: gil at eva.mpg.de
Webpage:  http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/