[Lingtyp] Novel future markers banned from negative contexts

[Omri Amiraz]

Dear colleagues,

Eitan Grossman and I are writing a paper about newly-grammaticalized future
markers that are banned from negative contexts, which results in
paradigmatic asymmetry where certain grammatical distinctions (e.g.,
remoteness) are absent in the negative.

We are currently aware of a handful of such cases (Tigre, Coptic,
Palestinian Arabic, Quebec French, Tok Pisin), and we’d be happy to know if
anyone knows of other relevant cases.

Also, Bybee et al. (1994: 271) make the tentative claim that novel future
constructions are often immediate futures: “[…] we interpreted primary
future grams with immediate future as a use as younger than grams whose
future use was simple future; that is, we were in effect suggesting that,
for primary futures, the use immediate future is diagnostic of a simple
future at an earlier stage of its development. Although we are not aware of
strong historical evidence attesting the generalization of an immediate
future to a general future gram (but see Fleischman 1983 for a claim that
this occurs), there are both formal and semantic indications of the youth
of immediate futures.”

Does anyone know of a more recent study that tried to test this hypothesis?

Omri Amiraz
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20231122/42df56e9/attachment.htm>