[SynSem] Marta Donazzan (U. Nantes)

retour Séminaire Syntaxe et Sémantique

Marta Donazzan (LLING / U. Nantes)

based on joint work with Hamida Demirdache, Ana Lucia Müller and Hongyuan Sun

Challenges and adjustments to the theories of Tense – about temporal interpretation in Karitiana

In this talk, I will present ongoing research on the temporal interpretation of main and subordinate clauses in Karitiana, a Tupi language spoken in North-West Brazil, focussing on the challenges and issues that empirical data from this language posit to the current theories of syntactic and semantic Tense. Karitiana has a number of remarkable features that set it apart from most tensed and tenseless languages: it displays an overt Future/Non Future Tense system in main clauses, while all subordinate clauses are superficially tenseless. The Future/Non Future split system has been proposed for some unrelated languages (Salish, Matthewson (2006), and Mandarin, Sun (2014)), but so far without evidence of an overt Non Future morpheme. Also, contrary to most Tupi languages, Karitiana bare subordinate clauses do not seem to suffer from restrictions on temporal interpretation, prompting a revision of current accounts based on a pronominal analysis of Tense. I will present some suggestions that may allow the Karitiana facts to fit into the general theory of Tense while keeping track of its specific grammatical features.