Past Tense Morphology in Tense and Modality
Final Report Abstract
The central aim of this project was to investigate the meaning of past tense morphology, with particular reference to the way it is syntactically represented. 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: (1) Edith bought a car (last year / *next year). But this is not always the case. For example, in the embedded clause of (2) past tense conveys, in its most prominent reading, that the embedded clause expresses that the car owning holds at the time of John’s saying. In such Sequence-of-Tense (SoT) cases, the contribution of the lower past tense appears vacuous. (2) John said he had a car. In other cases, past tense seems to express something different than reference to the past. In counterfactual conditionals like (3a), the past tense in the antecedent conveys that she does not own a car right now, as opposed to (3b) which is neutral with respect to whether or not she owns a car right now. (3) 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 too, as in (4). (4) We were meeting up tonight at 7pm, right? (Uttered before 7pm) This project aimed at achieving the following two objectives: O1 A description of the potential typological correlations between the phenomena discussed above and the way they are manifested; O2 A systematic description and understanding of the range of cross-linguistic variation of the phenomena outlined above, 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. As for O1, the project set up a method to investigate the parameters which are at play in counterfactuality and SoT language-internally and cross-linguistically. For this purpose, we designed two complementary questionnaires, one investigating counterfactuality and one investigating SoT. We collected 40 questionnaires of 23 different languages, belonging to 12 different language families overall. As for O2, the project lead to a new theory of counterfactuality in terms of commitment spaces, a new analysis of counteridenticals and counterpossibles, a systematic crosslinguistic investigation into counterfactuals, a new approach to SoT, an account of (past tense) futurates and spelled out the preliminaries of a unified perspective on counterfactuality and SoT in terms of non-actual-veridicality.
Publications
- 2017. ‘An Analysis of Counteridenticals in Terms of Dream Reports.’ Proceedings of ESSLLI 2017 Student Session
Kauf, C.
- 2017. ‘Explaining the Ambiguity of Past-Under-Past Embeddings.’ In A. Cremers, F. van Gessel & F. Roelofsen (eds), Proceeding of the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium. Amsterdam: ILLC. 315-324
Kauf, C. & H. Zeijlstr
- 2017. ‘May or might? Strength, duality, and social meaning. In A. Cremers, F. van Gessel & F. Roelofsen (eds), Proceeding of the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium. Amsterdam: ILLC. 305-314
Karawani, H. & B. Waldon
- 2018. 'Towards a New Explanation of Sequence of Tense.’ In S. Maspong, B. Stefánsdóttir, K. Blake & F. Davis (eds.), Proceedings of the 28th Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference 2018. 59-77
C. Kauf & H. Zeijlstra
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v28i0.4407) - 2018. ‘Expressing expectations.’ In B. Rabern & D. Ball (eds.), The Science of Meaning. Oxford University Press
Karawani, H., I. Crespo & F. Veltman
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198739548.003.0009) - 2019. ‘Indicative and subjunctive conditionals in commitment spaces.’ In J. Schlöder, D. McHugh & F. Roelofsen (eds.), Proceedings of the 22nd Amsterdam Colloquium. Amsterdam: ILLC. 248-258
M. Krifka
- 2019. ‘The asymmetry of fake tense’ In J. Schlöder, D. McHugh & F. Roelofsen (eds.), Proceedings of the 22nd Amsterdam Colloquium. Amsterdam: ILLC. 211-217
Karawani, H., C. Kauf & H. Zeijlstra
- 2019. ‘The past is rewritten.’ Snippets 37: 54-55
Karawani, H.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.7358/snip-2019-037-kara) - 2018. ‘Counteridenticals and dream reports: A unified analysis.’ ZAS Papers in Linguistics 61: 1-18
Kauf, C.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.61.2018.481)
