Explore the vast range of titles available.

The paper discusses the discourse-interactional functions of the past tense forms of the ’be’-verb in Udmurt (val and vylem). We focus on the analytic past tenses, in which forms of the ’be’-verb are traditionally analysed as auxiliaries. Our main attempt is to characterise these discourse-interactional uses, and their relation to analytic past tense forms and functions. We claim that these discourse-interactional functions should rather be attributed to the past tense forms of the ’be’-verb than to the analytic tenses themselves. In connection, the pragmaticalisation of val and vylem can be postulated. We propose that the use of val and vylem as tools of organising discourse is also linked to intersubjectivity. The results of our study show that val and vylem have a variety of discourse-interactional functions, independently of the tense of the finite verb in the analytic past tense. They are used to mark adversative, contrastive, additive, old, new and emphatic information. Similar phenomena occur in contact languages as well.

The present paper describes the -p edi- past tense in Western Karaim – the first such attempt made in the available scholarly literature. It is important to note that the paper is based not only on philological data collected from manuscripts from the 18th–20th centuries, but also on field research conducted by the late Polish Turcologist, Józef Sulimowicz (1913–1973). His linguistic informants were Karaims from Halych.

Recent literature has debated the nature and robustness of distinctions between pronominal tenses and existential tenses, between absolute tenses and relative tenses, and between perfect aspects and relative tenses. In this paper, we investigate anteriority markers in Javanese and Atayal, two distantly related Austronesian languages. On the basis of a range of empirical diagnostics, we propose that the markers tau in Javanese and -in- in Atayal are relative past tenses with existential semantics. We demonstrate that plausible alternative analyses are not tenable: these markers do not have pronominal tense semantics and they are not perfect aspects despite their salient ‘experiential’ interpretation. Further, we claim that a single language can possess both pronominal and existential tenses. Our diagnostics show that while tau and -in- are existential past tenses, Javanese and Atayal each also have a pronominal tense morpheme which is phonologically null and which pragmatically interacts with tau and -in-.

Theories of specific language impairment (SLI) in children turn on whether this deficit stems from a grammarspecific impairment or a more general speech-processing deficit. This issue parallels a more general question in cognitive neuroscience concerning the brain bases of linguistic rules. This more general debate frequently focuses on past-tense verbs, specifically, whether regular verbs (bake-baked) are encoded as rules, and whether irregular forms (take-took) are processed differently. Children with SLI have difficulties with past tenses, so SLI could represent an impairment to rules. An alternative theory explains past-tense deficits in SLI as resulting from a phonological deficit. Evidence for this theory has been obtained from connectionist models of past-tense impairments and from behavioral studies of language- and reading-impaired children. The data suggest that SLI is not an impairment to linguistic rules, that past-tense impairments can be explained as resulting from a perceptual deficit, and that a single processing mechanism is ideally suited to account for these children's difficulties.

The paper offers a novel analysis of deverbal, copulaless predicative forms derived with the suffix -(e)mi̮n in Udmurt. These have commonly been referred to as resultative participles in the literature, but have also been analysed as predicates of passive constructions and as perfects. The main question was whether a uniform analysis can be provided. The objective was to investigate whether -(e)mi̮n constructions show the same behaviour in 19th century folklore data and in contemporary corpus data. Results show that while all examples in the old data can be analysed as resultatives, -(e)mi̮n constructions have a heterogeneous use in contemporary Udmurt: the resultative use prevails, but some instances can be analysed as actional passives, others as perfects and still others as past tense forms. I argue that diachronically, the primary function of -(e)mi̮n forms was the expression of resultativity, and the synchronic heterogeneity is the reflection of two ongoing and typologically common grammaticalization processes: resultative > passive and resultative > perfect > past tense.

In this paper we add to what is known about the tense-marking limitations of children with specific language impairment (SLI) by exploring the acquisition of regular and irregular past tense, encompassing the age range of 2;6 to 8;9 (years;months) and comparing the performance of 21 children with SLI to that of 23 control children of the same age and 20 younger control children of equivalent mean length of utterance (MLU) at the outset. The analysis differentiated between the morphophonological component of past tense marking and the morphosyntactic component (finiteness). In the morphosyntactic component, the performance of the SLI group trails that of the two control groups over 3.5 years, whereas in the morphophonological component, the SLI group's performance is equivalent to that of the younger controls. Models of growth curves for regular past tense and irregular finiteness marking show the same pattern, with linear and quadratic components and the child's MLU at the outset as the only predictor. For morphophonological growth the picture changes, with an interaction of linear trend and MLU and the child's receptive vocabulary emerging as a predictor. The findings support a morphosyntactic model, such as the extended optional infinitive (EOI) model, with regard to the limitations in finiteness marking and for affected children.

This study examines variation in the use and interpretation of the perfective (pfv) aspect in negated past tense contexts across East Slavic and selected West and Southwest Slavic languages. Unlike West and Southwest Slavic, where the pfv + neg in past tense contexts allows for an interpretation denying the existence of the event at any past time, East Slavic uniquely interprets the pfv aspect in these contexts as indicating that the agent either planned but failed to realize the event or initiated it but failed to complete it. We account for this by assuming that negation operates either high (¬TP), as sentential negation, or low (¬vP), over the event domain. In East Slavic, the interaction of the pfv aspect with the past tense prevents high negation and enforces low negation, resulting in inhibited event reading. This reading implies that the event was expected or initiated but ultimately unrealized. We argue that the semantics of the pfv aspect in East Slavic parallels the semantics of specific indefinites in the nominal domain. The aspect head introduces a temporal variable t, which, via a choice function, restricts the domain of existential quantification over t to a singleton set, presupposing the existence of t, which cannot be canceled by high negation. Consequently, in negated pfv past tense contexts in East Slavic, negation scopes over the event domain giving rise to special interpretative constraints in past tense perfective contexts with negation.

According to many authors (Cinque 1999, Hacquard 2006, a.o.), epistemic modals in sentences such as “It had to be raining last night” always scope over past tense, expressing a present epistemic claim about a past event. However, there is no consensus on this point: for others (e.g. Rullmann & Matthewson 2018), epistemics can, or even must, scope below tense. This debate has substantial consequences for theories of modals. As of now, research lacks a systematic empirical description of the crosslinguistic picture. The examples discussed in the literature vary widely between languages, and most of the data comes from researchers’ own intuitions, fieldwork involving a limited number of informants, or informal questionnaires. The goal of this paper is, first, to settle the current disagreement on the judgments, by comparing in a more controlled way judgments in three languages, English, Dutch, and French. Second, it is to assess the prediction from Van Dooren (2020b) that there is variation between languages, which can be explained by crosslinguistic differences in modals’ lexical status: (semi-)auxiliaries versus verbs. We report two acceptability judgment experiments testing past tensed epistemic modal sentences’ interpretations in English, Dutch, and French, comparing had-to/moest/devait to the verbs seemed/leek/semblait, using identical sentences and methods and controlling for various factors overlooked in previous studies. We show that (i) epi>tense is available in all languages; (ii) English had-to is overall dispreferred as compared to Dutch moest and French devait. While we only find nuanced support for van Dooren’s proposal, our results open promising avenues for more controlled experimental research on modal-temporal interaction.

While the literature has often highlighted the differences between the defining features of past and future tenses, little attention has been paid to the similarities that bring these linguistic forms together. Taking European Portuguese data as a point of departure, it was my goal in this paper to investigate some of the correspondences that arise between these structures. So, I will endorse the idea that, in both the past and the future domains, there are equivalent strategies to perform temporal location. Thus, tenses, such as the Pretérito Imperfeito do Indicativo (Imp) in the past or the Futuro Simples (FS) in the future, which do not display relevant temporal constraints beyond the mere location of an eventuality in an interval before or after t0, interact with and are more easily influenced by other semantic categories, namely aspect and modality. On the contrary, tenses that require more evident temporal restrictions, in particular the imposition of final or initial boundaries to the situations with which they are combined, such as the Pretérito Perfeito Simples (PPerf) or the construction ir (‘go’) + Infinitive, have in common that they are less permeable to the influence of other external factors, with temporal location being their most prominent meaning.

In this paper, I analyze the verbal suffix -uŋil in Washo as an optional past tense. It is optional in the sense that it is not part of a paradigm of tenses, and morphologically tenseless clauses are also compatible with past time reference. Specifically, I claim that -uŋil is the morphological exponent of a tense feature [PAST], which presupposes that the reference time of the clause, denoted by a temporal pronoun, precedes the evaluation time. Meanwhile, morphologically tenseless clauses lack a semantic tense restricting the value of the reference time pronoun. In comparing this analysis with one containing a covert non-future tense in morphologically tenseless clauses, I show that the range of empirical contexts that distinguish these analyses is quite narrow. However, I offer a novel argument against a covert tense analysis based on the lack of Maximize Presupposition effects. Crucially, the fact that -uŋil does not form a paradigm of tenses results in a failure for Maximize Presupposition to apply. The proposed analysis places cross-linguistic variation at the level of the paradigm of tense features, namely whether they are present or absent, and if present, whether obligatorily so. This case study from Washo thus reveals what a language where tense features are optional can look like, and more generally contributes to the growing body of literature on cross-linguistic semantics devoted to uncovering the ways in which temporal interpretation can be achieved in natural language.