Nonpassive Verbal Periphrases in the Romance Languages

Verbal periphrases combine two verbal forms that share their arguments. One of the forms, [V2], lexically determines most of the argument structure of the whole construction, whereas the other, [V1], contributes the sort of abstract meaning usually associated with functional categories in the realms of tense, aspect, and modality and is often classified as a (semi-)auxiliary. In most cases, [V2] appears in a fixed nonfinite form (infinitive, gerund, or participle), whereas the inflection on [V1] is variable; the periphrastic pattern may also include a preposition introducing the nonfinite form. Research on verbal periphrases has concentrated on the differences between periphrastic patterns and free patterns of complementation or adjunction involving nonfinite clauses, on the syntactic analysis of those patterns, and on their semantic classification. The renewed interest in the field in recent years has two sources. On the one hand, research on grammaticalization has emphasized the importance of periphrases for our understanding of the way in which exponents for grammatical meanings emerge diachronically from lexical constructions. On the other hand, work in generative syntax (in the so-called cartographic approach) has taken periphrases as evidence for the postulated existence of highly articulated functional layers above a core verb phrase headed by a lexical verb. The bulk of nonpassive verbal periphrases either modify Aktionsart or express viewpoint aspect or relative tense. Research has revealed considerable differences in their inventory and in the status of cognate periphrases across Romance, as well as some parallel or convergent developments.

Temporal semantics of sentences with a deverbative turn (based on the works by E. D. Aypin)

hich is one of the important structural and semantic indicators of any syntactic construction. Objective: to describe the grammatical meaning of the temporality of simple polypropositive sentences that include verbal nominal grammems, as well as a turn with these grammems and dependent word forms (deverbative turns); to identify the features of the time of these sentences. Research materials: simple sentences with deverbative turns, extracted from two essays by E. D. Aypin, in which time plays the most important meaning, organizing and functional-stylistic roles within the entire text. Results and novelty of the research: the result of the study is the representation of a complex, multidimensional picture of time in the designated structures. Against the background of the absolute meaning of the past tense, various forms of the relative tense of the verbal noun and constructions, in which these names are the main components, are identified. The article describes the taxis and deixis of simple polypropositive sentences, the synchronous and asynchronous time perspective expressed in sentences by formal, lexical means, as well as by the logic of represented events. The novelty of the research is both the material itself (sentences with deverbative turns used in certain literary texts), and the identification of a complex composition of a time perspective, a specific time relationship of two events, two situations within a simple sentence.

Absolute-relative tense in Old Kanembu: foregrounding by posterior taxis

Old Kanembu is an extinct Saharan language that survives in annotations to the Qur’anic manuscripts of the 17th to 18th century. The past and future categories of Old Kanembu are absolute-relative tenses with posterior taxis as their orientational mechanism. The posterior location of events in temporal domains is tied up with the communicative goal of guiding the recipient through the complex Qur’anic discourse so that the foreground information and prominent elements are clearly set off against the background events. Similar properties are reported for the past and future tenses in Kanuri and therefore the Old Kanembu data corroborates a previously postulated hypothesis that the past and future in Kanuri are inherently focus categories (Wolff & Löhr 2006). Given that complexity of the Kanuri TAM system – significantly more elaborated than in the other Saharan languages – was triggered by the contact with Chadic languages and that Old Kanembu preserves archaic features going back to the 16th century and beyond, the semantic properties of the Old Kanembu past and future provide additional evidence of early Chadic influence on Kanuri.

The history of tense and aspect in the Sogeram family

This paper presents an overview of the tens-aspect system in the Sogeram languages of Papua New Guinea. Taking the Proto-Sogeram reconstruction in Daniels (2015, 2020) as a starting point, I outline the innovations that have taken place in daughter languages and discuss the patterns of change that emerge. The study confirms a variety of known cross-linguistic tendencies, such as the common occurrence of the analytic-to-synthetic and aspect-to-tense pathways of change. More notable trends include the diachronic stability of the present and most remote past tenses; the instability of the middle pasts and future; the stability of the relative semantic ordering of tenses; the absence of a pathway leading from relative-tense to absolute-tense marking; and the ability of innovative tenses to be inserted anywhere into the five-way tense system of Proto-Sogeram. The study also illustrates how featural systems can interact over time, at first by introducing a new feature value in one system which can combine with values from another (as with the Manat habitual), and then, if the featural distinction is lost, creating a pattern of distributed exponence (as in Mum).

Ways of expressing counterfactual conditionals in Mandarin Chinese

This paper discusses the ways in which Mandarin Chinese expresses counterfactual conditionals, and endeavours to motivate and theorize the use of such strategies. I aim to give an overall picture of Mandarin Chinese counterfactual conditionals, a topic which has hitherto not been covered in the Chinese linguistic literature. The strategies identified are the use of special lexicalized chunks to directly encode counterfactual meaning; the creation of tense mismatch and the accompanying counterfactual meaning, either through the use of relative tense pointing toward a hypothetical past event, or through the use of some special time adverbs; and the use of pure inference over conditionals with impossible or absurd antecedents. Overlaying these strategies is the presence of context-dependent simplifications, which may prompt the language user to omit the defining features of a given strategy.

The death of a virtuous woman? Proverbs 31.10-31, gnomic qatal, and the role of translation in the analysis of the Hebrew verbal system

This article draws attention to the phenomenon of translation-based interference in the analysis of Biblical Hebrew. It is argued that the so-called gnomic qatal only exists when we translate certain passages in a certain way. Based on Joüon’s approach to the verbs in Prov 31.10-31, it is demonstrated that it is possible to interpret the woman in the poem as deceased. Consequently, the predominant verbal forms in the passage ( qatal and wayyiqtol) are not gnomic, contrary to the almost universal rendering of the forms as present tense in modern translations. Rather, they have their usual anterior meaning. Other examples of translation-based interference in the analysis of Biblical Hebrew (including the question of the verbs in biblical poetry) are discussed, and a case is made for relative tense as the appropriate category for describing the semantic content of the basic opposition between the (non-volitive) finite verbal forms.

The semantics of pluperfect forms in Classical Armenian Gospels

The paper focuses on the semantic properties of Classical Armenian periphrastic verbal forms consisting of a participle in -eal and an auxiliary verb em ‘to be’ in past tense; the data are from Armenian translation of four Gospels. The pluperfect in Classical Armenian may function as past perfect representing resultative, stative, and experiential uses. Likewise, irreal (both hypothetical and counterfactual) and antiresultative meanings (non-achieved or cancelled result) are well attested. Finally, standard relative-tense uses are also frequent. The most important discourse function of pluperfect forms is related to marking «out-of-sequence» events. Cross-linguistically, this inventory of functions is more or less standard, but some details require further analysis.

The Perfect in (Brazilian) Portuguese: A Functional Discourse Grammar View

In most Germanic and Romance languages the present perfect has developed from a resultative meaning via an anterior into absolute past. In Functional Discourse Grammar terms this corresponds to the grammaticalization of a phasal aspectual operator at the layer of the Configurational Property, via a relative tense operator at the layer of the State-of-Affairs, into an absolute tense operator at the layer of the Episode. This is what happened in Romance languages, such as French and Italian, while Peninsular Spanish is developing in the same direction, without as yet having fully reached the absolute past stage. The Portuguese present perfect, however, is different as it does not express resultative aspect, relative past or absolute past meaning but rather the iteration or continuity of an event from some past moment onward until after the moment of speaking. A further idiosyncrasy of the perfect in Portuguese is that the auxiliary is based on Latin tenere rather than habere, as is the case in the other Romance languages. This paper describes the semantic and the morphosyntactic aspects of the grammaticalization of the (Brazilian) Portuguese perfect in diachrony and synchrony. It turns out that (i) the medieval habere-based Portuguese present perfect becomes obsolete and the past perfect develops into a relative past, (ii) the post-medieval tenere-based past perfect turns into a relative past as well, whereas (iii) the tenere-based present perfect undergoes semantic specialization in the course of the 20th century. This paper shows how these facts can be accounted for within the Functional Discourse Grammar approach to the grammaticalization of aspect and tense.