[Lingtyp] Intuitions about inclusive time reference

Sat Feb 17 10:42:54 UTC 2024

Dear Östen,

I think there is another component involved in the choice of verb form, at least in French: the SPEAKER's knowledge or belief about the completion of the process by Mary today.
(NB. focussing on 'today' is not necessary but more natural, at least that is how I feel it):

SIMPLE PRESENT
(1)Mary rend sa demande de financement aujourd'hui
or with focus:
(1b) C'est aujourd'hui que Mary rend sa demande de financement

With the Simple Present, the fact is stated independently of the speaker (and of any source of information), which gives it a general truth value that leaves no alternative (cf gnomic use of Simple Present), so, as a result of this, the speaker states (at least, everyone understands) that Mary has done or will do it at some point today: the temporal anchoring of the completion of the process as well as its or aspectual phases do not come into play here (cf Simple Present is described b Culioli (1991) as unbounded "non borné" in contrast to imperfective aspect which has 'open boundaries' vs. perfective 'closed boundaries)

If we take into account the fact that it was Mary who gave this information (source of the information), it is not necessary but more natural to add the modal auxiliary 'must':
Mary doit rendre sa demande aujourd'hui
MODAL AUXILIARY in the GENERAL PRESENT:
the speaker does not comment on whether Mary has done it, will be doing it today or not; he onlyreports Mary's point of view about what she has to do.

If  the statement is in the IMPERFECT tense (Imparfait):
Mary rendait sa demande aujourd'hui.
Without further indications the utterance sounds a little bit odd, unfinished.
It is because the Imperfect tense is considered to be a 'translation' (or transfer) of the Simple Present at a past moment and has been shown to have topical properties (i.e often functioning as a topic for a past event), probably due to its unbound (or open?) aspect.
That is why the utterance is more acceptable with afocused assertion using a focus on 'today':
C'est aujourd'hui que Mary rendait son article
A priori, the speaker assumes that Mary will have done it on time (i.e today, at a moment or another), cf. the retrospective effect of the Imperfect used at the time of speech combined with focus.

But the same sentence can be modified or corrected by some doubts expressed by the speaker, e.g:
mais je ne sais pas si elle l'a pu le faire
'but I don't know whether she managed to do it'
This shows that there is no personal commitment on the part of the speaker when using the Imperfect.

In contrast, with MODAL AUXILIARY (focussing on Mary's point of view) in the IMPERFECT:
Mary devait rendre sont article aujourd'hui
A priori, she speaker have strong doubts (because with the auxiliary at the Imperfect tense, the event is presented from the point of view of Mary, i.e her duty, not the completion of the event).
Nevertheless, this utterance can be again modified, corrected in one way or another.

That is how I feel it (I am a native speaker but not a specialist of French linguistics)
I hope this can help in one way or another.
Best regards

Stéphane ROBERT

________________________________
De : Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> de la part de Östen Dahl <oesten at ling.su.se>
Envoyé : vendredi 16 février 2024 10:46
À : lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Objet : Re: [Lingtyp] Intuitions about inclusive time reference

Many thanks to everyone who has responded to my query!

The background to my question was that I have been worrying about a well-known phenomenon that Astrid De Wit describes as follows in her book "The Present Perfective Paradox across Languages": "the assumption that there is a cognitive constraint on the alignment of bounded situations in their entirety with the time of speaking, and that this constraint is linguistically reflected in the fact that is difficult to use present perfective constructions with dynamic verbs to report present-time events".

My problem is that while it seems plausible that one cannot place a bounded situation in the present as long as the present, as Aristotle claimed, is not extended in time, the present tense in languages such as English and Russian can be used about non-punctual time intervals, if they include the time of speech, as in "Today the shops are closed" or "Segodnja magaziny zakryty". So you might expect that you should in fact be able to get perfective presents about events that take place with such an interval. But that is rather tricky. It should preferably be a single event, but if you speak of a single event taking place today, you will tend to get a past or future tense depending on whether it is before or after the time of speech, e.g. "Today I got a letter from Mary" or "Today I will write to Mary". So the question is: what happens if I don't know the exact time of the event? I decided to do my best to construct a situation of that kind.

I think that at this point, I had better not get into further lengthy explanations but just summarize the result of the query (so far).

Whatever language responses were about, the major tendency was to modify the sentence so as to reflect the source of the information, that is, either state explicitly that this was something Mary had said or just use a form or construction that indicated that this was what had been planned. Some respondents also used plain present-referring constructions. I don't think anyone used a straightforward future tense or anything equivalent, but I may have missed that. - Particularly notable was the use of the past tense in Dutch pointed out by Astrid De Wit and Kees Hengeveld.

Christian Lehmann points out that a simple present tense would be more likely if I had not mentioned the source of information. My intention was to make the context as clear as possible. However, I think this illustrates a general difficulty with  elicitation as a method. If you mention some aspect of the context in the instructions, this potentially makes it more salient to the respondent than it would be in a natural situation. The respondent may feel a need to include it somehow in the response even if they would not do so "in real life".

- Östen
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