What is it about?
In Tłı̨chǫ, the future tense is marked by the particle HA after the verb. If HA is not uttered, the sentence cannot be interpreted as referring to the future. However, the corresponding past marker, ĮLÈ, is optional: sentences without it can be past or non-past. This system is the opposite of English, where past marking is obligatory in sentences referring to the past, but future marking is optional for sentences referring to the future. I propose that the future in Tłı̨chǫ is how the language expresses tense structurally, while the past in Tłı̨chǫ is not true tense.
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Why is it important?
The topic of tense as an obligatory functional category has not been the subject of investigation in Dene languages until recently. The findings of this paper suggest that further research may unearth more systems that are significantly different from better known languages like English.
Perspectives
This paper combines two key methodological tools: syntactic obligatoriness as a diagnostic for tense as an anchoring category, and semantic obligatoriness for a given interpretation. It also compares the formal syntactic notion of anchoring with the functionalist notion of syntactic prominence, and demonstrates that they are not correlated: a language that makes a functional category morphosyntactically prominent is not necessarily anchored by that category.
Nicholas Welch
Memorial University of Newfoundland
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Obligatory Future In A Dene Language, International Journal of American Linguistics, January 2015, University of Chicago Press,
DOI: 10.1086/679042.
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