Tom Koss (University of Antwerp), a visiting scholar in our department, will give a research seminar.
(Non-) Present-time reference from a typological perspective
The default function of a present-tense construction would appear to be locating situations at the time of speaking. Yet, in various languages, the so-called present tense can only be used to refer to the ongoing present when combined with stative verbs reporting unbounded situations (De Wit 2017). For dynamic verbs, denoting bounded events, different semantic interpretations emerge. English is a case in point: the simple present can be used to report present-time states (1), but not present-time events (2).
(1) I have my laptop with me right now.
(2) *I play tennis right now.
If the simple present does combine with dynamic verbs, the default interpretation is a habitual one (Bybee et al. 1995):
(3) I play tennis three times per week.
English is by no means an isolated case: it is well known that in other languages too, grams used to express present-time reference with stative verbs have a non-present interpretation with dynamic verbs (De Wit 2017). One can identify three different non-present interpretations that are commonly assigned to the combination of a so-called ‘present tense’ and dynamic verbs. More precisely, the construction that is used as a present tense with stative verbs can be given one of the following interpretations when used on dynamic verbs:
1) a past interpretation (‘past pattern’; e.g., Lingala [Bantu, DR Congo])
2) a future interpretation (‘future pattern’; e.g., Japanese)
3) a general-validity (habitual or generic) interpretation (‘habitual pattern’), illustrated here through the English example
A fourth possibility is that the construction that is used as a present tense with stative verbs is ungrammatical when used on dynamic verbs (‘incompatible pattern’; e.g. Awa Pit [Barbacoan, Colombia]). Other languages (e.g., French) have present tenses which can be used to refer to the ongoing present with both stative and dynamic verbs. I refer to these constructions as ‘transparent present tenses’.
This talk will present the results of an ongoing typological study investigating this particular interaction between tense and lexical aspect in a sample of 180 languages. The sample has been geographically and genealogically stratified by means of the genus-macroarea method (Miestamo 2009), yielding six macroareas. One crucial finding is that the non-present interpretation of present tense constructions is by no means a rare phenomenon, being observable in about one third of the languages under
consideration. Also, the past pattern is by far the most common, which offers cross-linguistic corroboration for claims made in Smith & Erbaugh (2005) about the default (cognitively most plausible) past interpretation of verbs referring to bounded situations.
The results presented in this talk are based on the study of descriptive grammars. The second stage in this project will be to investigate a subsample of 50 languages more closely by means of a translation questionnaire in the tradition of Dahl (1985), with the ultimate aim to create a semantic map on the use of present tense grams across languages. My research stay at UBC is meant to develop such a questionnaire, and to carry out a pilot study.
References
Bybee, Joan L., Revere Perkins, and William Pagliuca. 1994. The evolution of grammar: Tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dahl, Östen. 1985. Tense and Aspect Systems. Oxford: Blackwell.
De Wit, Astrid. 2017. The Present Perfective Paradox across Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Miestamo, Matti. 2009. Implicational hierarchies and grammatical complexity. In Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable. Edited by Geoffrey Sampson, David Gil, and Peter Trudgill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 80-97.
Smith, Carlota S., and Mary S. Erbaugh. 2005. Temporal Interpretation in Mandarin Chinese. Linguistics 43: 217-256.
