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So-called ‘zero’ or ‘null’ tenses have often been characterized as functionally deficient forms, deprived of any inherent content. In this paper, we will focus on the semantics of a morpho-phonologically null inflectional verbal paradigm in Anindilyakwa (Groote Eylandt, N.T., Australia, which is both temporally and aspectually underspecified. Throu...
Citations
... Along the same lines, creole languages, such as Sranan, feature zero-marked present-tense forms that trigger a present interpretation of states and a past interpretation of events (cf. Holm 2000 for an overview; Prescod 2013, p. 74;De Wit and Brisard 2014; see also Dechaine (1991), and Bohnemeyer and Swift (2004) for analogous cases in other languages, and see Caudal and Bednall (2022) in this issue for a particularly nuanced perspective taking into consideration more fine-grained actionality classes). ...
... Michaelis (2013) frames this interaction as the manifestation of a 'say and see' problem: in order to report a situation as ongoing at the time of speaking, one must also be able to instantly identify this situation (see also Michaelis 2004). Similar reasoning underlies Smith and Erbaugh's (2005) 'Bounded Event Constraint', which states that situations that are construed as temporally bounded cannot be located in the present (see also the Temporal Schema Principle discussed in Caudal and Bednall (2022)). As a resolution to the incompatibility of the present tense with bounded situations, a non-present (i.e., not 'now') interpretation is assigned to the clause (De Wit 2017, pp. ...
... It is the interplay between these perfective grams and actionality that triggers the PPP; as soon as a perfective viewpoint is imposed on an event (whether this is in the form of a transition-sensitive or a non-transition-sensitive gram), we end up with the present-time alignment issues outlined in Section 3.1. We believe this proposal, which recognizes the intrinsically perfective value of constructions such as the English simple present, constitutes an improvement with respect to accounts that focus solely on actionality (see also Caudal and Bednall 2022) and analyze the English simple present as an aspectually sensitive construction that selects only states (e.g., Michaelis 2004;Michaelis 2011;and Altshuler and Schwarzschild 2013). Apart from the fact that it brings together analogous patterns across languages with different grammatical systems in a unified model, our approach also has the advantage that it can account for "special" uses of the English simple present, e.g., in performative or narrative contexts, which are hard to explain in terms of stative selection (De Wit 2017, pp. ...
The distinction between perfective and imperfective aspect has been identified in many languages across the world. This paper shows that even languages that do not have a dedicated perfective—imperfective distinction may endow a verbal construction that is not specifically aspectual with a perfective value. The crucial diagnostic for identifying perfectivity in a given non-aspectual construction is a difference in the temporal interpretation of clauses involving that construction, licensed by the actionality class of the main predicate: while stative verbs have a present interpretation, dynamic verbs yield a non-present (past or future) interpretation. This pattern of interaction is triggered by a phenomenon that has been referred to as the ‘present perfective paradox’, i.e., the impossibility of aligning dynamic situations with the time of speaking while at the same time conceptualizing them in their entirety. The latter type of construal is argued to be the main function of perfective aspect. The range of non-aspectual constructions with underlying perfective semantics includes ‘iamitive’ markers, an evidential, an epistemic supposition marker, a focus marker, a polar question marker, and a declarative marker. These constructions come from typologically different and genetically unrelated languages, illustrating the cross-linguistic salience of the category of perfective aspect.
