Re: Tense marked on nouns

On Thu, 3 Jun 2004 14:00:17 -0500, Mark P. Line <mark@...> wrote:

>Paul Roser said:
>> On Thu, 3 Jun 2004 15:28:11 +0100, Peter Bleackley
>> <Peter.Bleackley@...> wrote:
>>
>>>Is there any language where tense is marked on a noun rather than the
>>> verb?
>>>It seems that English is heading towards tense being marked on the
>>> subject,
>>>but is the process complete in any language?
>>>
>>>Pete
>>
>> There are a number of languages (including Tariana, Somali, and Salish)
>> that mark tense on the noun or noun phrase, though I don't think any have
>> nominal marking to the exclusion of verbal marking.
>
>
>I can think of three situations where somebody might be inclined to
>believe that nouns are being marked for tense (but I believe otherwise).
>
>(1) There is a process of tense spreading (in a few Australian languages,
>at least; there may be others) in which all clause constituents except the
>subject are marked for tense if tense is marked. This is better described
>as agreement. There are other languages in which more limited tense
>agreement occurs.
>
>(2) There are languages (including English) in which verbs can be derived
>from nouns without any derivational morphology. The verb 'impact' is
>neologistic in my lifetime, for example. This is still a form of
>derivation, though -- there's nothing to be gained from describing this as
>a noun marked  like a verb: it's been turned *into* a verb.
>
>(3) There are languages (including a large proportion of Austronesian) in
>which no such classes as "nouns" or "verbs" are distinguished -- pretty
>much any open-class lexical item can be used either way. This might make
>it appear as though a "noun" is being marked for verbal features.
>
Nordlinger and Sadler distinguish two types of nominal tense
marking, 'independent nominal TAM' and 'propositional nominal TAM', in the
former specifying TAM (tense/aspect/mood) information intrinsic to the
nominal itself - eg. 'my former wife', 'the ex-president' - and the latter
providing TAM info often in conjunction with the TAM of the verb - which is
probably equivalent to the 'tense agreement' of Australian languages.

A particularly nice example of the former is provided for Iate, a Brazilian
language:

-Realis-
present  'that which is a house/serving as a house'
past     'that which was once a house/stopped being a house'
future   'that which will be a house/house which is being built'
-Possible(Irrealis)-
present  'a possible house/something which has the possibility of
          being a house'
past     'something which would have been a house but wasn't/had the
          possibility of being a house'

In Somali tense on nominals seems to have a deictic function not unlike
spatial orientation (the near house vs the far house, vs the current house
vs the past house/former house).

N&S report that in some languages the number of tenses are essentially the
same for both nominals and predicates, which would go along with (3) above
in languages where the distinction between nouns and verbs (Austronesian,
Salish, etc) is tenuous, but there are also cases (I believe Tariana falls
into this group) where the tenses for nominals form a simpler system than
for true predicates (as exemplified in the outline I sent to the list
previously, Tariana nominals have decidedly different though equally
complex morphology when compared to the predicates).

Bfowol

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