Re: tense marking and typology

On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, J.Barefoot wrote:

> I'm trying to come up with a pragmatic tense marking system for Asiteya (or
> Astya, both tenetative names, really just the word for "the language"),
> where different word orders mean different tenses. Is there any precedent
> for this? Does it violate typology rules completely to allow SVO, VSO and
> SOV in the same language
As far as I know, no, there is no natlang precedent for using word order
to mark tense.  From a typological standpoint, the very notion seems
bizarre to me.  But it's a fascinating idea!

In my experience, word order is generally used to mark either (a)
grammatical relations like "subject" and "object", or (b) discourse
notions like "topic" and "focus", or (c) both.  (People often claim that
there are languages with completely free word order.  However, such
claims are usually accompanied by cryptic, hedging statements like
"word order may be used for emphasis", or some such.  Personally, I
don't believe in the existence of languages with *completely* free
word order, but that opinion is based on admittedly limited experience.)

Because of its association with topic/focus, word order *does*
sometimes mark distinctions that are vaguely related to tense -
such as the distinction between 'generic' event-types or states,
and 'specific' events.  In my conlang Tokana, for example, the
subject of an intransitive verb must occur before the verb if the
verb denotes a characteristic property of that subject.  If the
verb denotes an accidental/occasional/transitory property of the
subject, then the subject can follow the verb.  For example:

        Ne  Tsion umpatima
        the John  be.crazy
        "John is crazy"

        Umpatima ne  Tsion
        be.crazy the John
        "John is being/acting crazy"

The first sentence (with SV order) would usually be used to
mean that John is a crazy person - that being crazy is an
integral part of who he is.  The second sentence (with VS
order) must mean that being crazy is a transitory property
of John - i.e. he is doing crazy things right now, but
he's not necessarily an inherently crazy person.

That's the closest thing I can think of, though, to an
interaction between word order and tense.

Matt.