37.3306, Confs: (Proposed) Workshop at SLE 2027 – Remoteness Marking: What Is It, and What Is It For? (Slovakia)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3306. Wed Oct 14 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3306, Confs: (Proposed) Workshop at SLE 2027 – Remoteness Marking: What Is It, and What Is It For? (Slovakia)

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Date: 12-Oct-2026
From: Thera Marie Crane, Bastian Persohn & Malin Petzell [thera.crane at helsinki.fi]
Subject: (Proposed) Workshop at SLE 2027 – Remoteness Marking: What Is It, and What Is It For?


(Proposed) Workshop at SLE 2027 – Remoteness Marking: What Is It, and
What Is It For?
Short Title: SLE 2027 WS

Date: 25-Aug-2027 - 28-Aug-2027
Location: Košice, Slovakia
Contact: Thera Crane, Bastian Persohn, Malin Petzell
Contact Email: thera.crane at helsinki.fi

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Cognitive Science;
Pragmatics; Semantics; Typology

Submission Deadline: 05-Nov-2026

Time is central to the human experience, to human cognition, and to
human languages. Many languages – though few major European ones –
grammatically distinguish not only past, present, and future times,
but also degrees of past or future time, as in Aghem’s hodiernal
(today)–based system in (1). Some languages are reported to have many
more distinctions.
(1) Aghem (Grassfields Bantu; Anderson 1979: 88–95)
        a.      ghé     mɔ̂             sù
fɨ̀ghàm
                3PL     P1              wash            mat
                ‘they washed the mat’  [today]
        b.      ghé     mɔ̀     sú                      ꜜfɨ́ghâm
                3PL     P2              wash      mat
                ‘they washed the mat’ [before today]
        c.       ghé    sɨ̂             sùu             fɨ̀ghàm
                3PL             F1              wash    mat
                ‘they will wash the mat’ [today]
        d.      ghé     lɔ́              sùu            fɨ̀ghàm
                3PL     F2              wash            mat
                ‘they will wash the mat’ [after today]
Dahl (2013: 39) estimates at least 15% of the world’s languages
grammatically distinguish temporal remoteness; these languages are
largely concentrated in Africa, the Americas, and Papua New-Guinea,
with more scattered occurrence elsewhere, and are notably absent in
most languages spoken in Eurasia. Perhaps partly as a result of this
areal distribution, remoteness distinctions are frequently described
in grammars, but they have received somewhat less attention in
typological and theoretical studies (cf. Nurse 2008; Botne 2012; Dahl
2013), and many open questions remain. For example, past forms are
often used cyclically, with the same morphology used when referring to
the current day, year, season, or even era (Nurse 2008, inter alia).
However, not all grammatical descriptions specify whether this is the
case. Furthermore, the boundaries between the time periods to which
different remoteness forms can be used are sometimes discrete, and
sometimes flexible, but grammars are often silent on this point (Nurse
2008: 90). In other cases, systems described as relating to temporal
remoteness may in fact primarily be based on to other features and
concepts (see e.g. Savić 2026 on Xhosa). The boundary between the
present day and previous (or subsequent) days is important enough that
it is the most common distinction marked in multiple-tense systems
(Nurse 2008: 90–91; Botne 2012; Dahl 2013). However, even basic
questions like what is the boundary between today and yesterday? are
rarely addressed rigorously, although the answer to this question may
have important implications about the relationship between grammatical
structures and the encoding of memories (e.g. during sleep, see Crane
2011: 236–237; Dahl 2013: 43).
In addition, although speakers frequently report intuitions about how
remoteness markers can be exploited for social functions, positioning
a speaker with respect to a reported event (e.g. associating or
distancing oneself from it; see, for example, the papers in Botne &
Fanego 2023). However, interactional studies of remoteness marking are
almost vanishingly rare, so little is known about how they are
employed and negotiated in everyday speech. Because of these lacunae
and others, we still lack the necessary data to understand the natures
and functions of these systems. Why do speakers innovate them, given
their complexities and the potentially higher processing costs (Dahl
2013)? What are their limits, and how do these correspond to the
encoding and retrieval of memories, and to social indexical functions?
This workshop aims to bring together researchers working on remoteness
distinctions from various perspectives, in order to better understand
their typological distribution, their properties, and their uses. An
important goal of the workshop is to establish a longer-term research
community.
We therefore welcome proposals for papers, from any theoretical
perspective, dealing with (but most certainly not limited to) the
following topics and themes:
 - Typological perspectives on remoteness systems, their distribution,
and their conceptual limits
 - Detailed descriptions of remoteness systems in particular languages
 - “Outlier” systems, with (typologically, areally…) unexpected
numbers or types of contrasts
 - Interactions between remoteness and other linguistic systems, e.g.
aspect, evidentiality, egophoricity, the grammar of space, modality,
information structure, and negation
 - Conversation-based studies
 - Cognitive perspectives (e.g. remoteness and memory)
 - Historical perspectives (how systems develop)
 - Remoteness marking and cultural concepts of time
 - Remoteness marking in multilingual contexts; contact involving
languages with different systems, or those lacking remoteness entirely
 - Remoteness marking and theoretical models of tense
Interested participants should send us a title and preliminary
(100-word) abstract by 5 November 2026, so that we can submit the full
proposal by the 20 November deadline. Please send abstracts to Thera
Crane (thera.crane at helsinki.fi).
Selected Bibliography:
Anderson, Stephen C. 1979. Verb structure. In Larry M. Hyman (ed.),
Aghem grammatical structure, 73–93. Los Angeles: University of
Southern California, Department of Linguistics.
Botne, Robert & Axel Fanego Palat (eds.). 2023. Domains and Regions in
Bantu tense and aspect. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.
Botne, Robert & Tiffany L. Kershner. 2008. Tense and cognitive space:
On the organization of tense/aspect systems in Bantu languages and
beyond. Cognitive Linguistics 19(2): 145–218.
Botne, Robert. 2012. Remoteness distinctions. In Robert A. Binnick
(ed.), The Oxford handbook of tense and aspect, 536–562. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Cable, Seth. 2013. Beyond the past, present, and future: Towards the
semantics of “graded tense” in Gĩkũyũ. Natural Language Semantics
21(3): 219–276.
Crane, Thera Marie. 2011. Beyond time: Temporal and extra-temporal
functions of tense and aspect marking in Totela, a Bantu language of
Zambia. Berkeley, California: University of California at Berkeley.
Crane, Thera Marie. 2023. Non-metrical tense distinctions in
isiNdebele (South Africa). In Robert Botne & Axel Fanego Palat (eds.),
Domains and Regions in Bantu tense and aspect, 105–127. Köln: Rüdiger
Köppe Verlag.
Dahl, Östen & Viveka Velupillai. 2013. The Past Tense.  In: Dryer,
Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) WALS Online (v2020.4) [Data
set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13950591  (Available
online at http://wals.info/chapter/66, Accessed on 2026-10-07.)
Dahl, Östen. 1985. Tense and aspect systems. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Dahl, Östen. 2103 Tense–Aspect–Mood–Evidentiality (TAME) and the
organization of human memory. In Molsing, K. V., & Ibaños, A. M. T.
(eds.), Time and TAME in language, 22–53. Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Khachaturyan, Maria, Erika Sandman & Thera Crane. 2024. Doing things
with grammar: Presupposition accommodation across grammatical
categories. Functions of Language 31(2): 166–207.
Nurse, Derek. 2008. Tense and aspect in Bantu. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Nurse, Derek. 2019. Data for tense and aspect systems in Bantu. Royal
Museum for Central Africa.
Saviċ, Stefan. 2026. The pragmatic functions of the auxiliary verbs za
‘come’ and ya ‘go’ in isiXhosa. Nordic Journal of African Studies
35(1): 289–315.



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