On the expression of Tense-Aspect-Mood on nouns: Evidence from Tundra Nenets, SOAS

• published: 09 Mar 2015
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http://www.soas.ac.uk/linguistics/ This Linguistics seminar by Irina Nikolaeva titled "On the expression of Tense-Aspect-Mood on nouns: Evidence from Tundra Nenets" was given at SOAS, University of London on 7 January 2014. More details about this event: http://bit.ly/1BiPSWy There has been a growing body of literature on the expression of grammatical tense on nouns and the temporal interpretation of noun phrases. The paper contributes to these debates by examining the so-called predestinative forms in Tundra Nenets (Uralic). Predestinatives are productively derived by suffixation but are only available on possessed nouns. Their meaning can roughly be described as a two-place relation “the future X of Y”. I argue that they express a TAM-like category with nominal scope, either future tense or subjunctive/irrealis mood. In the tense analysis, Nenets patterns together with some other languages where tense is only active in possessive constructions but is not expressed in non possessive NPs. Predestinatives indicate that the time of the possessive relation follows the situation time and may additionally express that the nominal time is also in the future. However, there are also reasons to analyse predestinatives as a modal category rather than tense, and I present syntactic arguments for this claim. The paper concludes that Tundra Nenets data clearly indicates the presence of TAM on nouns, but whether it is tense or mood ultimately depends on how we define these categories.