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Share Paper 3706

Nominal Tense as Modifiers of Resource Situations
Kimberly Johnson
142-151 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

In some languages, temporal information is encoded on nouns by morphemes dubbed Nominal Temporal Morphemes (NTMs), which contribute independently to the temporal interpretation of the noun (Nordlinger & Sadler 2004). In some languages of this kind, past NTMs trigger a Change of State entailment, indicating that the nominal predicate no longer holds of the entity. In other languages, past NTMs receive Discourse Related interpretations, which refer to a past time relevant for the identification of the entity, such as a previous mention. Previous analyses of NTMs focus on only one of the two interpretations and assume NTMs occupy just one position in an NP (Thomas 2014; Ivan & Özyıldız 2016). However, based on original fieldwork on Mvskoke (Creek), this paper demonstrates that there are two distinct types of NTMs which co-occur in Mvskoke. It is argued that Mvskoke NTMs occupy two different positions in an NP. NTMs receiving Discourse Related interpretations are temporal modifiers of resource situations. NTMs receiving Change of State entailments are tense morphemes lower in the NP.

Published in

Proceedings of the 40th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Jiayi Lu, Erika Petersen, Anissa Zaitsu, and Boris Harizanov
Table of contents
Printed edition: $425.00