Refine
Document Type
- Article (2)
- Part of a Book (1)
- Doctoral Thesis (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (4)
Keywords
- tense (4) (remove)
Publicationstate
- Postprint (3)
- Zweitveröffentlichung (2)
- Veröffentlichungsversion (1)
Reviewstate
Publisher
- Benjamins (1)
- Oxford University Press (1)
- Steiner (1)
- Universität Potsdam (1)
Tense, aspect, and mood are grammatical categories concerned with different notional facets of the event or situation conveyed by a given clause. They are prototypically expressed by the verbal system. Tense can be defined as a category that relates points or intervals in time to one another; in a most basic model, those include the time of the event or situation referred to and the speech time. The former may precede the latter (“past”), follow it (“future”), or be simultaneous with it (or at least overlap with it; “present”). Aspect is concerned with the internal temporal constituency of the event or situation, which may be viewed as a single whole (“perfective”) or with particular reference to its internal structure (“imperfective”), including its being ongoing at a certain point in time (“progressive”). Mood, in a narrow, morphological sense, refers to the inflectional realization of modality, with modality encompassing a large and varying set of sub-concepts such as possibility, necessity, probability, obligation, permission, ability, and volition. In the domain of tense, all Germanic languages make a distinction between non-past and past. In most languages, the opposition can be expressed inflectionally, namely, by the present and preterite (indicative). All modern languages also have a periphrastic perfect as well as periphrastic forms that can be used to refer to future events. Aspect is characteristically absent as a morphological category across the entire family, but most, if not all, modern languages have periphrastic forms for the expression of aspectual categories such as progressiveness. Regarding mood, Germanic languages are commonly described as distinguishing up to three such form paradigms, namely, indicative, imperative, and a third one referred to here as subjunctive. Morphologically distinct subjunctive forms are, however, more typical of earlier stages of Germanic than they are of most present-day languages.
This paper investigates the long-term diachronic development of the perfect and preterite tenses in German and provides a novel analysis by supplementing Reichenbach’s (1947) classical theory of tense by the notion of underspecification. Based on a newly compiled parallel corpus spanning the entire documented history of German, we show that the development in question is cyclic: It starts out with only one tense form (preterite) compatible with both current relevance and narrative past readings in (early) Old High German and, via three intermediate stages, arrives at only one tense form again (perfect) compatible with the same readings in modern Upper German dialects. We propose that in order to capture all attested stages we must allow tenses to be unspecified for R (reference time), with R merely being inferred pragmatically. We then propose that the transitions between the different stages can be explained by the interplay between semantics and pragmatics.
In diesem Artikel wird der Tempus-Modus-Gebrauch in indirekter Redewiedergabe im Niederdeutschen im Vergleich mit dem Hochdeutschen, Englischen und Norwegischen untersucht. Die hochdeutsche Standardsprache verfügt über eine voll ausgebaute Indikativ-Konjunktiv-Unterscheidung, wobei eine der Funktionen des Konjunktivs in der Markierung indirekter Rede besteht. Viele andere germanische Sprachen, hier vertreten durch das Englische und Norwegische, kennen keine vergleichbare Konjunktivkategorie (mehr). Indirekte Rede steht dort im Indikativ, wobei häufig das Phänomen der Tempusverschiebung zu beobachten ist. Das nördliche Niederdeutsche kennt ebenfalls keine distinkten Konjunktivformen, womit sich die Frage stellt, ob auch die Redewiedergabe wie in den anderen konjunktivlosen Sprachen funktioniert. Der vorliegende Beitrag geht dieser Frage im Rahmen einer empirischen Untersuchung nach. Als Datengrundlage dienen nordniederdeutsche Radionachrichten. Es zeigt sich, dass die Verteilung von Präsens und Präteritum in den niederdeutschen Radiodaten weiter ausfällt als in den konjunktivlosen Vergleichssprachen: Das Präsens tritt, wie im Hochdeutschen, auch dort auf, wo im Englischen und Norwegischen mit einer Verschiebung zum Präteritum zu rechnen wäre. Und für das Präteritum ergibt sich eine reportiv-konjunktivische Verwendung, die keine Entsprechung im Englischen oder Norwegischen hat.
This thesis investigates temporal and aspectual reference in the typologically unrelated African languages Hausa (Chadic, Afro–Asiatic) and Medumba (Grassfields Bantu). It argues that Hausa is a genuinely tenseless language and compares the interpretation of temporally unmarked sentences in Hausa to that of morphologically tenseless sentences in Medumba, where tense marking is optional and graded. The empirical behavior of the optional temporal morphemes in Medumba motivates an analysis as existential quantifiers over times and thus provides new evidence suggesting that languages vary in whether their (past) tense is pronominal or quantificational (see also Sharvit 2014). The thesis proposes for both Hausa and Medumba that the alleged future tense marker is a modal element that obligatorily combines with a prospective future shifter (which is covert in Medumba). Cross-linguistic variation in whether or not a future marker is compatible with non-future interpretation is proposed to be predictable from the aspectual architecture of the given language.