Re: Tense marked on nouns

Sally Caves said:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mark P. Line" <mark@...>
>
>
>> I was contrasting this with clause-level tense marking, which does *not*
>> have a lot to do with any particular noun participant in the clause:
>> tense
>> is marked on the verb when it's marked morphologically. (At least, I
>> haven't seen a counterexample yet.)
>
> Only in some conlangs? :)
Right. None of the proposed natlang examples I've seen (here or in the
literature) qualify as clause-level tense.


> elry krespr, "past-I write"?  (I wrote)  Unless
> I
> still misunderstand you here.
If the morpheme meaning 'past' in this example is an affix attached to the
personal pronoun, then this would be an example of tense marked on
pronouns. If you can do the same thing with nouns, then that would be an
example of tense marked on nouns -- which was what we were looking for in
this thread.


> When the VERB is marked morphologically,
> you
> say?  or when TENSE is marked morphologically?
I meant: When tense is marked morphologically, it is marked on the verb
(in natlangs, of course).

Just to make sure you stay confused, I should note that "marked on the
verb" is still somewhat oversimplified -- there are languages with serial
verbs and/or auxiliary verbs that take tense affixes (or other
morphological processes), and there are languages that defy the concept of
"verb" in the first place. My point is that when there's tense morphology
in a language, that morphology works on (some part of) the clause's
predicate, not on its subject or object or whatever.


> What confuses me is what it is that you
> are counter-arguing; it seems to me that Jim gave almost precisely the
> same
> example with "dog" (now I wish I hadn't snipped it above!), his only
> omission being that he didn't put these words in a clause which would
> illustrate their temporal relations within a sentence.
It's because Jim glossed his examples as (something like) "the then-dog",
"the now-dog" and "the future-dog", which I interpreted as meaning that
the noun was being modified -- not expressing clause-level tense.

Jim has since posted to this point to clear it up.


> In other words,
> the
> clause is needed to see how the tense-marked noun expresses valence?
I reckon. Jim's glosses were at least ambiguous; showing how the "tense"
morphology affects the clause meaning is what is necessary to establish
that it really is *tense*.


-- Mark

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