ELKE NOWAK

Technische Universität Berlin

Evidence for Time. Time for Evidence

Today the statement that a certain language lacks tense does not cause an uproar anymore. Linguists even have accepted the fact that languages which do without obligatory tense marking constitute the majority (cf. Bybee1985)

Yet tense and its grammatical marking still tends to be a focal point of interest. This is no surprise since in Indoeuropean languages and consequently, in the gammatical frameworks tailored for them, tense plays a dominant role with respect to verb inflection. Tense often shows elements of aspect, like the perfective, and aspects often contain temporal traits, like the completive.

In older descriptions of Kalaallisut and Labrador Inuttut, with the exception of Kleinschmidt 1851 and Freitag 1849, tense is quite naturally assumed to be part of inflection, a misconception that lead to serious descriptive problems.

More recent descriptions acknowledge that reference to time is handled differently in Inuit languages as compared to the familiar Indoeuropean pattern.

Most obvious is the fact that inflection does not bear a tense feature. Tense is marked via affixing and, as Fortescue 1984 points out for Kalaallisut, the only indesputable tense markers are for the future (Fortescue 1984:271). With respect to the past, a number of affixes are listed (Harper 1979, Nowak 1994), which carry aspectual features, too.

In my presentation I will re-examine the "tense marking" affixes and I will propose an alternative interpretation. I will suggest that with all these affixes reference to time is only a secondary feature. The primary feature refers to a distinction concerning what I would like to label "evidence" for the time being, in lack of a more appropriate term. I will try to describe this aspect more precisely and I will point out that the destinction made by it can be found in other areas of the language as well.

References

Bybee, Joan 1985: Morphology. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Fortescue, Michael 1984: West Greenlandic. London: Croom Helm.

Harper, Kenn 1979: Suffixes of the Eskimo Dialects of Cumberland Peninsula and North Baffin Island. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada.

Nowak, Elke 1994:Tempus und Temporalität in Inuktitut. In: Tense Systems in European Languages. Edited by Rolf Thieroff and Joachim Ballweg. Tübingen: Niemeyer 295-310