Nominal Tense with Nominal Scope: a Preliminary Sketch

The morphosyntactic categories of tense, aspect and mood are traditionally considered to be properties of verbs. However, the morphological expression of these categories within the nominal system is attested across a range of languages. Drawing on data from a number of languages, we provide a preliminary sketch of the phenomenon of nominal tense with nominal scope that is, cases in which nominal tense serves to temporally locate the nominal independent of the temporal specification of a governing predicate. 1 Types of Nominal Tense Although the categories of tense, aspect and (to a lesser extent) mood are traditionally considered to be properties of verbs, the morphological expression of tense, aspect and/or mood (henceforth TAM) on nominals is attested across a range of languages. We distinguish two major subcases of nominal tense, that is, of cases in which TAM marking occurs on a nominal or other constituent of NP/DP.1 In some cases, a dependent nominal or nominal phrase (of whatever grammatical function) bears some TAM marking which serves to temporally, aspectually or modally specify the clausal predicate which is itself distinct from the nominal argument. This is illustrated by examples (1)-(2)) in which the case marking of the dependent NPs changes to reflect the tense (future vs. nonfuture) of the clausal predicate: (1) Ngamari-lu mother-ERG ngunytyi-ka give-PAST ngali-nha we.DU-ACC mangarni-marru-nga-nha bone-having-GEN-ACC kathi-nha. meat-ACC. Mother gave us the doctor’s meat. (Pitta Pitta (Australia), Blake 1987:60, ex. 4.12) (2) Ngamari-ngu mother-NOM.FUT ngunytyi give ngali-ku we.DU-ACC.FUT mangarni-marru-nga-ku bone-having-GEN-ACC.FUT kathi-ku. meat-ACC.FUT. Mother will give us the doctor’s meat. (op. cit., ex. 4.14) We refer to this as nominal tense with clausal scope (NT-CS for short). In Nordlinger and Sadler (2000) we discuss several cases of NT-CS, demonstrating that this phenomenon is well attested and showing how it can be simply analysed in LFG using inside out statements. Further work is needed to draw up a typology of exponence for NT-CS, and on the description of the interaction at the clausal level of nominally and verbally expressed clausal TAM features. We will have nothing more to say in the present paper about this phenomenon (but see Nordlinger and Sadler (in preparation)). In other cases, the nominal tense has scope only over the nominal constituent itself, that is, is interpreted with respect to the nominal phrase (rather than the verb phrase). This paper is concerned with the phenomenon of nominal tense with nominal scope (NT-NS for short). Here two subcases are conceptually distinct. In what are sometimes called nominal sentences, the nominal itself is not an argument of a verbal predicate but serves as the main predicate of the proposition, without showing any signs of undergoing morphological derivation to form a verb (see, for example, 4.3 below). When such a nominal (or noun phrase) is tensed, we refer to this as nominal tense on nominal predicates (NT-NP for short). In many languages, subordinate ‘clauses’ often involve the use of predicates which are transparently nominal in category but which bear TAM marking, and this is another situation in which NT-NP is attested (Koptjevskaya-Tamm 1993). Although we exemplify both these sorts of construction briefly below, for reasons of space we will concentrate mainly in this paper For ease of exposition, we use the term nominal tense throughout to refer to TAM marking on nominal elements. Throughout this paper we interpret nominal tense to mean nominal tense with nominal scope, in the sense to be defined below. LFG01 — Nominal Tense 2 on the second subcase. Here tense is marked on a dependent 2 nominal and serves to temporally locate that nominal independent of the temporal specification of the governing predicate. We can refer to this as nominal tense on a nominal dependent (NT-ND for short). Most of the data in this paper exemplifies this phenomenon. The distinctions between cases of nominal tense outlined above can be summarised in the the following diagram: