Past Tense Morphology in Tense and Modality

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Manfred Krifka; Professor Dr. Hedde Zeijlstra, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2016 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 289431000

In typical cases, past tense morphology simply marks that the event expressed by the verb or predicate is located prior to the time of utterance. But this is not always the case. For example, in the embedded clause of (1) past tense conveys, in its prominent reading, that the embedded clause expresses that the car owning holds at the time of Johns dream. In such Sequence-of-Tense cases, the contribution of past tense appears vacuous.(1) John dreamed he had a car.In other cases, past tense seems to express something different than reference to the past. In counterfactual conditionals like (2)a, the past tense in the antecedent conveys that she does not own a car right now, as opposed to (2)b which is neutral with respect to whether or not she owns a car.(2) a. If she had a car now, she could drive to school.b. If she has a car now, she can drive to school.Sometimes, past tense is compatible with reference to times in the future, as in (3). In some languages, past tense morphology may be used in imperatives, even though imperatives, being performative, generally require a present or future interpretation (4). And finally, past tense morphology can sometimes convey particular speech acts, as shown in (5).(3) We were meeting up tonight at 7pm, right? (Uttered before 7pm)(4) Had dat eerder gedaan! (Dutch)Had that earlier done(You better had done that earlier.)(5) a. I had a beer, please. (uttered to a waiter)b. What was your name?Even though these phenomena all have been analysed independently from each other, they have never been analysed under one perspective. There is no theory, yet, of past tense morphology that explains all these meaning aspects. Also, as the cross-linguistic variation with respect to the meaning of past tense morphology has not been systematically investigated, it is unknown yet whether these five addressed phenomena are cross-linguistically correlated or not. However, if they are typologically related, this calls for a more integrated theory of past tense morphology. Hence what is needed is an overarching perspective on past tense morphology that covers all its usages. This project provides this perspective. In short, we aim to achieve the following goals: I. A description of the potential typological correlations between the phenomena discussed above and the way they are manifested on the basis of a cross-linguistic investigation of language sample consisting of 25 unrelated and well-spread languages and on the basis of a smaller number of in-depth studies of particular languages; II. A systematic description and understanding of the range of cross-linguistic variation of the phenomena outlined above; III. An overarching perspective and understanding of the syntax, semantics, pragmatics and typology of past morphology, such that the co-occurrence of the discussed phenomena, as well as their typological correlations and their ranges of cross-linguistic variation can be naturally captured.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants