Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
Nominal Tense in Cross-Linguistic Perspective (Nordlinger & Sadler)
This week's paper provides a cross-linguistic view on the topic of nominal tense. While tense is traditionally considered a verbal category, it may also appear on nominals in some languages. Phrases like 'my former' in 'my former house' can be expressed by a single affix in these languages. Some even mark other non-tense categories, like mood and evidentiality on nouns (e.g. Nambiquara wa³lin³-su³-n³ti² 'this manioc root that both you and I saw recently'). Now let's move onto the prompts:
- Does your language feature nominal tense?
- Which tenses can nominals be marked for?
- How does it interact with possession?
- How does it interact with definiteness and articles, if there are any?
- Can nominal tense morphemes be stacked? What semantics does such a stacking yield?
- If your language does not feature nominal tense, is there any special way in which your language expresses such contexts?
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
Submit your papers here!
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!