[Lingtyp] Novel future markers banned from negative contexts

[Alexander Coupe]

Dear Omri,

Mongsen Ao (Tibeto-Burman, Nagaland NE India) is a language with a newly-grammaticalized immediate future whose source, I believe, is a purposive nominalizer. A verb stem inflected with the immediate future cannot be negated. A non-realized negated event instead requires the irrealis marker. Another peculiarity of the immediate future is that a speaker requires epistemic authority to predict the immediate occurrence of an event encoded by the immediate future.

Coupe, A. R. (2013). Tense, but in the mood : diachronic perspectives on the representation of time in Ao. Language and linguistics, 14(6), 1105-1138. https://dr.ntu.edu.sg/handle/10356/101726

Best,
Alec

--
Assoc. Prof. Alexander R. Coupe, Ph.D. | Associate Chair (Research) | School of Humanities | Nanyang Technological University
48 Nanyang Avenue, SHHK-03-84D, Singapore 639818
Tel: +65 6904 2072 GMT+8h | Email: arcoupe at ntu.edu.sg<mailto:arcoupe at ntu.edu.sg>
Academia.edu: https://nanyang.academia.edu/AlexanderCoupe
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1979-2370
Webpage: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/arcoupe/




From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Omri Amiraz <Omri.Amiraz at mail.huji.ac.il>
Date: Wednesday, 22 November 2023 at 4:33 PM
To: "lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org" <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: [Lingtyp] Novel future markers banned from negative contexts


[Alert: Non-NTU Email] Be cautious before clicking any link or attachment.
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
________________________________

CONFIDENTIALITY: This email is intended solely for the person(s) named and may be confidential and/or privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, please delete it, notify us and do not copy, use, or disclose its contents.
Towards a sustainable earth: Print only when necessary. Thank you.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20231122/da3976fc/attachment.htm>