[Lingtyp] futures

Wed Jun 21 16:53:20 UTC 2023

Dunno if thie helps, but n Yahgan (a recently extinct Native American
language from Tierra del Fuego, which I've studied for the past quarter
century), the simple future suffix is -u:a/-oa (depending on the vowel(s)
preceding it. Colon here represents the tenseness of the vowel preceding
it. A 'further future' could be formed by adding the increment -ana after
the simple future. (As an aside- the simple past tense suffix, -ude:/-ide:
(again depending on the vowel(s) preceding it, and also has its own
increment -aka for 'further past'.  -u:a is identical to one of the
imperative suffixes, and although it is now impossible to discern the order
of grammaticalization, it seems clear (at least to me) that they both share
a 'will' specification, as in English 'You will marry a tall, handsome
doctor' as future, and 'You WILL marry a tall, handsome doctor' as
imperative.  It may be that modal verb we: (preposed to the verb) 'greater
probability' so denoting 'will, may, can, etc.' is another
grammaticalization from the future, while le:, 'lesser probability' (which
is postposed after the verb) may be related to the simple past -ude:/-ide:.
The verbal prefix la- 'back' (essentially equivalent to Latinate re-) could
be another. A parallel development for the future might be the verbal voice
prefix u:- (permissive causative) (as opposed to the default causative
tu:-).

Jess Tauber

On Wed, Jun 21, 2023 at 12:29 PM Wiemer, Bjoern <wiemerb at uni-mainz.de>
wrote:

> 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).
>
>
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> [image: 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
>
> https://www.slavistik.uni-mainz.de/univ-prof-bjoern-wiemer/
>
> https://uni-mainz.academia.edu/Bj%C3%B6rnWiemer
>
>
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