TY - JOUR
T1 - Mood as verbal definiteness in a "tenseless" language
AU - Baker, Mark
AU - Travis, Lisa
N1 - Funding Information:
* The research for this paper was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, grant 410-95-0979 to the first author and grant 410-93-0897 to the second author, and Fonds pour la Formation de Chercheurs et l’Aide à la Recherche de Québec, grant 94ER0578, whose support we appreciate. We have also benefited from the opportunity to present parts of this work at colloquia at Cornell University, the University of Calgary, and MIT, and thank the audiences there for their input and suggestions; particular thanks to Brendan Gillon, Nigel Duffield, Jennifer Ormston, Ben Shaer, Mürvet Enç, Veena Dwivedi, Betsy Ritter, Karin Michelson, and Claire Lefebvre. It is no secret that our training and experience is more focused on “natural language” than on “semantics”; we thank Richard Larson and two anonymous NALS reviewers for their detailed comments, corrections, and help with background references, and editors Angelika Kratzer and Irene Heim for their guidance in sorting through these materials. No doubt there are still problems and mistakes; these are our responsibility.
PY - 1997
Y1 - 1997
N2 - This article argues that the mood morphemes found on punctual verbs in Mohawk are to be analyzed semantically as markers of verbal definiteness/ specificity. In particular, the so-called future marker is an indefinite morpheme, indicating that the event argument of the verb undergoes Heim's (1982) rule of Quantifier Indexing. In contrast, the seeming past marker is a marker of definiteness/specificity, indicating that the event argument is immune to Quantifier Indexing. This explains many apparent peculiarities of the Mohawk verbal system, including: the use of "future as a past habitual form, the use of mood prefixes in conditionals, free relatives, and complement clauses, and the incompatibility of "past" with negation. The relationship between indefinite mood and future events, where it exists, is explicated in terms of the branching theory of time proposed by Dowty (1979) and Kamp and Reyle (1993), which is grounded in a fundamental asymmetry in how humans conceive of the future versus the past.
AB - This article argues that the mood morphemes found on punctual verbs in Mohawk are to be analyzed semantically as markers of verbal definiteness/ specificity. In particular, the so-called future marker is an indefinite morpheme, indicating that the event argument of the verb undergoes Heim's (1982) rule of Quantifier Indexing. In contrast, the seeming past marker is a marker of definiteness/specificity, indicating that the event argument is immune to Quantifier Indexing. This explains many apparent peculiarities of the Mohawk verbal system, including: the use of "future as a past habitual form, the use of mood prefixes in conditionals, free relatives, and complement clauses, and the incompatibility of "past" with negation. The relationship between indefinite mood and future events, where it exists, is explicated in terms of the branching theory of time proposed by Dowty (1979) and Kamp and Reyle (1993), which is grounded in a fundamental asymmetry in how humans conceive of the future versus the past.
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U2 - 10.1023/A:1008262802401
DO - 10.1023/A:1008262802401
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:28044450085
SN - 0925-854X
VL - 5
SP - 213
EP - 269
JO - Natural Language Semantics
JF - Natural Language Semantics
IS - 3
ER -