Nominal Tense in Crosslinguistic Perspective

It is a general assumption in linguistic theory that the categories of tense, aspect, and mood (TAM) are inflectional categories of verbal classes only. In a number of languages around the world, however, nominals and other NP constituents are also inflected for these categories. In this article we provide a comprehensive survey of tense/aspect/mood marking on NP constituents across the world's languages. Two distinct types are identified: PROPOSITIONAL, NOMINAL TAM, whereby the nominal carries TAM information relevant to the whole proposition, and INDEPENDENT NOMINAL TAM, in which the TAM information encoded on the nominal is relevant only to the NP on which it is marked - independent of the TAM of the clause as a whole. We illustrate these different types and their various properties using data from a wide range of languages showing that, while certainly unusual, the phenomenon of nominal tense/aspect/mood marking is far less marginal than is standardly assumed. Nominal TAM inflection must be accepted as a real possibility in universal grammatical structure, having significant implications for many aspects of linguistic theory

Tense Beyond the Verb: Encoding Clausal Tense/Aspect/Mood on Nominal Dependents

It is generally held that clausal temporal, aspectual and modal features, when encoded morphologically, are expressed by or on clausal heads. However nominals and modifiers within NP can also be inflected for tense, aspect and modal features interpreted with respect to the clausal predication rather than with respect to the nominal argument itself. Such nominals (and dependents within NP) therefore contribute syntactic tense, aspect and mood features to the clause, but do not themselves have syntactically active TAM features. Building on previous work we show how a simple account of this phenomenon can be given in the lexicalist, constraint-based theory of LFG. In particular, the use of inside-out function application in LFG permits us to capture directly the role of nominal morphology in defining clausal TAM properties without recourse to derivational or feature passing mechanisms

Split Tense and Mood Inflection in Wambaya

Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Historical Issues in Sociolinguistics/Social Issues in Historical Linguistics (1995

Getting in Touch: Language and Digital Inclusion in Australian Indigenous Communities

Indigenous people in remote Australia face many dilemmas in relation to the status and vitality of their languages and communication ecologies. Cultural leaders want to maintain endangered heritage languages, yet this concern is balanced against an awareness that English competency is a necessary life skill. Remote Indigenous groups must also negotiate the effect of globalized media on language and cultural practices. While public policy seeks to bridge the digital divide in remote Australia, little attention has been paid to the dominance of English in the new digital environment and the potential impact that increased English language activities may have on endangered Indigenous languages. In this paper we discuss the Getting in Touch project, a joint initiative between linguists, Australian Indigenous language speakers, and software developers. Using a participatory, collaborative process, the project aims to develop ideas for digital resources that privilege Indigenous languages and knowledge systems. We argue that taking Indigenous languages into account in app design may help enhance digital literacies in remote Indigenous communities and promote digital inclusion.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Case stacking in realizational morphology

Case stacking, the phenomenon whereby a single word may bear multiple cases reflecting its relation to a number of different syntactic elements, is an important phenomenon both for the development of theories of inflectional morphology and for our understanding of the relation between morphology and syntax. However, to date it has received virtually no attention from theoretical morphology. Working within the inferential-realizational framework of paradigm function morphology (PFM), we provide a morphological analysis of the phenomenon of case stacking as found in the Australian Aboriginal languages Kayardild (Tangkic) and Martuthunira (Pama-Nyungan). We argue that the standard assumptions concerning morphological property sets in PFM are too weak to satisfactorily accommodate case stacking morphology, and we propose that (in some languages) the morphological property sets which define paradigm cells are structured rather than being the simple objects of the standard view. We show how this provides a comprehensive analysis of the complex case and number stacking facts and further, allows for a straightforward (although nontrivial) mapping between the morphology and the syntax as outlined in Sadler and Nordlinger (2004). © Walter de Gruyter

Nominal juxtaposition in Australian languages: An LFG analysis

It is well known that Australian languages make heavy use of nominal juxtaposition in a wide variety of functions, but there is little discussion in the theoretical literature of how such juxtapositions should be analysed. We discuss a range of data from Australian languages illustrating how multiple nominals share a single grammatical function within the clause. We argue that such constructions should be treated syntactically as set-valued grammatical functions in Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). Sets as values for functions are well-established in LFG and are used in the representation of adjuncts, and also in the representation of coordination. In many Australian languages, coordination is expressed asyndetically, that is, by nominal juxtaposition with no overt coordinator at all. We argue that the syntactic similarity of all juxtaposed constructions (ranging from coordination through a number of more appositional relations) motivates an analysis in which they are treated similarly in the syntax, but suitably distinguished in the semantics. We show how this can be achieved within LFG, providing a unified treatment of the syntax of juxtaposition in Australian languages and showing how the interface to the semantics can be quite straightforwardly defined in the modular LFG approach. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009