[Lingtyp] Intuitions about inclusive time reference

[Östen Dahl]

Dear Astrid and all,

I didn't mean that the situations overlap with the time of speaking, I was thinking of the interval denoted by "today" as containing the moment of speech. That wasn't too clear perhaps. I wasn't too worried about those cases, rather I wanted to see what happened if you tried to speak of an event that you knew had happened or would happen within such an interval. You're right that it probably depends on what grammatical distinctions there are in the language. Swedish works more or less similarly to Dutch here, so we can say in the present tense "Mary lämnar in sin projektansökan idag". 

Actually I'm not sure the situations have to overlap with the moment of speech, even in stative sentences. Suppose some shops are open in the morning and other shops are open in the afternoon and none are open during lunch. I guess you could still say at lunch time  "The shops are open today", even if they are all closed at that point. If someone disagrees, write to me privately and I will post a summary afterwards. 

Response to Paolo Ramat's posting, which just came: I didn't intend to deny that you can use the future or past tense if you restrict the time span. 

Best,
Östen

-----Ursprungligt meddelande-----
Från: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> För Astrid De Wit
Skickat: den 19 februari 2024 18:04
Till: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Ämne: Re: [Lingtyp] Intuitions about inclusive time reference

Dear Östen,

You're right - it's very difficult to come up with a good elicitation technique for this one!

As for the question you were asking yourself, I just wanted to check whether I'm getting this correctly. You're saying that the present tense is sometimes used to refer to non-punctual situations as long as these situations overlap with the time of speaking, but the English example (I must admit I can't say anything about Russian in this case) involves a stative situation, right? "Shops are closed today, shops remain closed today,..." Even if they are temporary states, these are states nonetheless and can therefore be made to coincide with the present, i.e. the time of speaking, because they have the sub-interval property. So I don't think these examples show that the present is extended in time. But perhaps this isn't what you were trying to say, and I misunderstood completely?

Now that you've given some additional explanation on the kind of context you were after (and indeed, with less focus on the source of information), I think it would be possible to use a present tense in Dutch and say "Marie dient vandaag haar onderzoeksvoorstel in", if you don't know whether or not she's already submitted her proposal. But the Dutch present tense is aspectually ambiguous - or that's what I would say at least - and can therefore refer to situations where, in English for instance, you'd have to use a progressive. I'm not a native speaker of English, but the sentence "Mary submits her application today" seems less felicitous in this context. I would read this as a part of a series of planned events or something along those lines ("So, Mary submits her application today, and I do the same tomorrow, and then what?"). Almost narrative-like.

In any case, interesting food for thought - thank you!

Astrid

-----Original Message-----
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> On Behalf Of Östen Dahl
Sent: vrijdag 16 februari 2024 10:46
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Intuitions about inclusive time reference

CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.


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
_______________________________________________
Lingtyp mailing list
Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
https://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
_______________________________________________
Lingtyp mailing list
Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
https://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp