[Lingtyp] futures

[Wiemer, Bjoern]

Dear linguists' community,
I'd like to bother you with a couple of questions concerning constructions (grams etc.) considered as 'futures'. To delimit the notion of 'future', I propose to abide by this working definition:

FUTURE
[1]       For comparative purposes, a construction (marker, gram) can be considered a sufficiently conventionalized future if among its core, or default, functions we find reference to a single (episodic) situation that is posterior to a reference interval. In the prototypical case, this reference interval is the current moment of speech (deictic time reference), but posteriority may also hold with respect to another time interval (shifted, or anaphoric, time reference).

Now, my questions are as follows:

1.         Do you know of futures that did not simply disappear, but which turned into something else             (entering, as it were, a "post-future stage")?
2.         If this happened, did these constructions keep their previous use as futures (probably as a minor pattern), or was this use lost (in favor of the post-future function(s))?

3.         It is generally hard, or just impossible, to distinguish between prediction (i.e. an epistemic judgment concerning a situation after the moment of speech) and "future pure and simple", i.e. just a statement, or question, about a single posterior situation (in accordance with [1] above). However, both functions (prediction vs "future proper") may be distinguished formally, e.g. if a future construction shows some variation in its morphosyntactic "design". For instance, a morpheme recognized as future marker may occur with the lexical verb either together with an irrealis marker or without it, and the absence/presence of that irrealis marker can be employed to distinguish the two aforementioned functions that are otherwise difficult to keep apart.
            Do you know of any such cases (and their diachronic background)?

4.         In some languages, futures can be used for epistemic judgments relating to the current moment of speech (e.g., He will be in London now). For languages in which this has been observed, does this use apply only to a handful of verbs (in particular, only to 'be' and 'have')? Or is it productive, i.e. without restrictions as for the lexical basis?
                        Please note that languages may show this function only (or primarily) with accompanying lexical markers of epistemic judgment (e.g., sentence adverbs like certainly).

5.         By analogy, in many languages, futures have been observed to be employed as directives (e.g., You'll go and sleep now, will you!). Bybee et al. (1994: 273) even found that "imperative use is the most commonly occurring other use of futures", and they assumed that "the imperative use develops out of the future use".
            Given this background, do you know of language(s) in which futures were/are not used for uttering directive speech acts? Conversely, do you know of languages in which future use can be claimed to have evolved from imperatives (or similar forms/constructions used in directive speech acts)?

I'd appreciate any hints and discussions concerning these issues, and would be very grateful for references concerning particular languages. If enough responses come up, I'm ready to produce a digest for this list.

Best,
Björn (Wiemer).


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[obraz.png]
Björn Wiemer
Professor für slavistische Sprachwissenschaft
Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität
Institut für Slavistik, Turkologie und zirkumbaltische Studien (ISTziB), Abt. Slavistik
Jakob-Welder-Weg 18
D- 55099 Mainz

Tel. +49/ 6131/ 39 -22186
Fax +49/ 6131/ 39 -24709
Sekr. +49/ 6131/ 39 -22807 (Fr. Fotteler)
wiemerb at uni-mainz.de<mailto:wiemerb at uni-mainz.de>
https://www.slavistik.uni-mainz.de/univ-prof-bjoern-wiemer/
https://uni-mainz.academia.edu/Bj%C3%B6rnWiemer

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