Nominal Tense in Cross-linguistic Perspective

It is a general assumption in linguistic theory that the categories of tense, aspect and mood are inflectional categories of verbal classes only.1 However, there are a number of languages around the world in which nominals and other NP constituents are also inflected for tense, aspect and mood (henceforth TAM). That nominals may be inflected for TAM has been noted in the grammatical descriptions of individual languages for some time (e.g. Boas (1947) on Kwakiutl, Guasch (1956) and Gregores and Suárez (1967) on Guaranı́, Hockett (1958) on Potawatomi, Firestone (1965) on Sirionó, among others), and, more recently, in various typological works (e.g. Anderson 1985, Mel’čuk 1994, Evans 2000, Lehmann and Moravcsik 2000, Raible 2001). Nevertheless, the possibility of TAM as an inflectional category of nominals has remained largely omitted from general linguistic discussion.2 The purpose of this paper is therefore to provide a detailed survey of the phenomenon of nominal TAM and its properties in a variety of the world’s languages. We argue that, while certainly unusual, the phenomenon is far less marginal than the general paucity of discussion in the literature might lead one to expect.