[Lingtyp] Intuitions about inclusive time reference

Thu Feb 22 09:34:21 UTC 2024

Dear all,

Björn asks: "In particular, isn't it the case that the current interval called "today" (as part of a chain 'day + night' = 24 hours, or Russ. 'sutki', etc.) gains a somewhat special treatment by people, and that this becomes manifest in language?"

Yes, that is true, but it is made more complex by the fact that part of 'today' is past and part of it is future. So hodiernal tenses are usually either "hodiernal pasts" or "hodiernal futures". I think I haven't seen anything that would qualify for being called a "hodiernal tense" tout court, but my memory may be faulty, and I am prepared to be corrected. And actually 'today' creates a problem for the claim that tense choice is determined by topic time, since we say things like "Today, I met Mary" and "Today, the snow will melt away", where it seems that the tense depends on event time. And as Alex Francois pointed out, some languages have different words for 'today before now' and 'today after now'. So I asked myself: what happens if you want to refer to something that you know happened/will happen today but you don't know when? But this turns out to run into problems, which I think primarily have to do with the fact that events in the past and events in the future more or less by necessity differ in their epistemic or may even ontological status -- although, as we have seen in the discussion, many other considerations come into play.

- Östen

-----Ursprungligt meddelande-----
Från: Wiemer, Bjoern <wiemerb at uni-mainz.de> 
Skickat: den 21 februari 2024 12:19
Till: Östen Dahl <oesten at ling.su.se>; Astrid De Wit <astrid.dewit at uantwerpen.be>; lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Ämne: RE: [Lingtyp] Intuitions about inclusive time reference

Dear Östen, Astrid and everybody else,
I have been following this interesting discussion raised by Östen's elicitation request, but now cannot but ask a simple, and maybe too trivial and silly, question. As I understand tense (as a grammatical category), in particular present tense, it is not always about time measured in a physical sense, but rather about what Klein has called the topic you make a statement (or question, or request) about (therefore Topic Time). This topic is usually by necessity "located" somewhere on the timeline (or whatever imagination we might have about "time"), but even if, in a physical sense, the moment of speech is contained in the interval ('day + night' = 24 hours) the speaker wants to make a statement about, the choice of a TAM form often seems to be influenced rather by reference to some knowledge background ('information source') and concomitant degrees of epistemic commitment. That's probably why many of the first replies to Östen's request "drifted" into that domain. The inverse side of the (probably) same phenomenon seems to be that (speakers of diverse) languages might not be very much "suited" for providing just one conventional and short form that would be capable of denoting exactly what Östen has been after. So, my question is: is the apparent lack of such a form (or: the problems connected to giving a short answer to Östen's question) an indication of the rarity of such a communicational need? That is, a need of only being very precise about a bounded event time within a cyclical interval (of which the utterance interval is a small subinterval) without specifying anything about the speaker's knowledge/belief status (certainty etc.)? In other words: for natural language use this sort of question might be too outlandish, because speakers are just "more interested" in other aspects of reference to (bounded) events than just and only their temporal location in relation to the time of speech.
	Of course, this doesn't solve the descriptive (so to say, the onomasiological) problem posed by Östen, but I think it might say something about how people "use" language. In particular, isn't it the case that the current interval called "today" (as part of a chain 'day + night' = 24 hours, or Russ. 'sutki', etc.) gains a somewhat special treatment by people, and that this becomes manifest in language? After all, some languages seem to make grammatical distinctions between "hodiernal past" and just "(non-hodiernal) past", and ways of saying things about what is closer to the moment of speech (and speakers'/hearers' immediate consciousness) like "just happened" (e.g., the French "venir de" kind of past) vs "probably will happen in a moment" (as with prospectives, e.g. many futures developed from "go-"periphrases) appear to be more salient (and frequently spoken about) than situations that are more remote (or beyond the actual daily cycle). 
	By the way: is there any language that has a conventional way of expressing something close to utterance time irrespective of before or after utterance time? I think, this would be Östen's original request, but related to a special form (something like a "hodiernal tense" marker), not to the use of widely known forms (like present tense, progressive, simple, or whatever).

This is just one of the questions arising to me when I follow this discussion. But I don't want to bother you further. I hope that I haven't yet bothered too much.

Best,
Björn (Wiemer).

-----Original Message-----
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> On Behalf Of Östen Dahl
Sent: Monday, February 19, 2024 6:58 PM
To: Astrid De Wit <astrid.dewit at uantwerpen.be>; lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Intuitions about inclusive time reference

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

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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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