Beyond the Past, Present and Future: Towards the Semantics of 'Graded Tense' in Gĩkũyũ
Seth Cable
June 2012
 

In recent years, our understanding of how tense systems vary across languages has been greatly advanced by formal semantic study of languages exhibiting fewer tense categories than the three commonly found in European languages (Bohnemeyer 2002, Lin 2006, Matthewson 2006, Jóhannsdóttir & Matthewson 2007, Tonhauser 2011). However, it has also often been reported that languages can sometimes distinguish more than three tenses (Comrie 1985, Dahl 1985, Bybee et al. 1994). Such languages appear to have ‘graded tense’ systems, where the tense morphology serves to track how far into the past or future a reported event occurs. This paper presents a formal semantic analysis of the tense-aspect system of Gĩkũyũ (Kikuyu), a Northeastern Bantu language of Kenya. Like many languages of the Bantu family, Gĩkũyũ appears to exhibit a graded tense system, wherein four grades of past tense and three grades of future tense are distinguished. However, I argue that the prefixes traditionally labeled as ‘tenses’ in Gĩkũyũ exhibit important differences from (and similarities to) tenses in languages like English. I will defend the hypothesis that, like tenses in English, these ‘temporal remoteness prefixes’ in Gĩkũyũ introduce presuppositions regarding a temporal parameter of the clause. However, unlike English tenses, these presuppositions concern the ‘Event Time’ of the clause directly, and not the ‘Topic Time’. Consequently, the key difference between Gĩkũyũ and languages like English lies not in how many tenses are distinguished, but in whether tense-like features are able to modify other, lower verbal functional projections in the clause. (Please note that this is an extensively revised version of the 2011 article "Between Tense and Adverbs: The Semantics of Temporal Remoteness in Kikuyu." It contains corrected data, and so supercedes all previous drafts.)
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/001536
(please use that when you cite this article, unless you want to cite the full url: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/001536)
Published in: Under review by Natural Language Semantics
keywords: tense, graded tense, maximize presupposition, bantu, gĩkũyũ, kikuyu, semantics
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