An Underspecified Tense in St’át’imcets

The first goal of this paper is to determine whether superficially ‘tenseless’ sentences like (1b) contain a covert tense morpheme; I will argue that they do. The second goal is to determine what the semantics of that tense morpheme is. I will propose that (1b) contains a phonologically null tense morpheme which is lexically underspecified with respect to whether the reference time precedes or overlaps with the utterance time. I will show that this analysis is empirically distinguishable from, and preferable to, an alternative analysis according to which St’át’imcets possesses both a null past and a null present tense morpheme. The material presented here forms part of a broader research agenda, whose aims are to discover what constraints exist on tense systems cross-linguistically. As a first step toward the broader perspective, I will examine the consequences of my analysis of St’át’imcets for learnability and for cross-linguistic variation.