Semantics etc.

“Jacqueline Lecarme”:http://www.llf.cnrs.fr/fr/Lecarme/ has two papers on nominal tense:

• “Tense in Nominals”:http://www.llf.cnrs.fr/fr/Lecarme/TAarticle.pdf. To appear in J. Guéron & J. Lecarme (eds), The Syntax of Time, Cambridge: MIT Press.
• “Nominal Tense and Evidentiality”:http://www.llf.cnrs.fr/fr/Lecarme/EV-article-final.pdf. To appear in J. Guéron and L. Tasmowski (eds), Tense and Point of View, Presses de l’Université Paris X-Nanterre.

bq. This paper explores a largely ignored, but I believe highly revealing, parallel between the verbal and nominal domains with respect to the interaction of tense, modality and evidentiality. I focus on the relation between nominal tense and (direct) evidentiality in Somali, a language of the East Cushitic family. I specifically address the following questions: Why is it that the -ii morphology that shows up on Somali determiners alternates between a past tense meaning and a direct evidential meaning, i.e., the expression of (non)- visibility? What are the formal mechanisms that can explain the double use of the past/evidential forms crosslinguistically? Building on work by Izvorski (1997) and Iatridou (2000), I will argue that the evidential character (non-visible) is a particular instance of a modal use of the past tense. In addition, by discussing other (non-temporal and non-evidential) uses of modalized determiners in the particular contexts of generic and habitual sentences, free relatives, conditional clauses, I will explore the possibility that Kratzer’s (1981, 1991) theory of relative modality might lead to a unified analysis of the tense/evidentiality connection, including the one found in nominals.

[Note: the pdf files look a little fuzzy onscreen, but should print out fine. I tried “my usual trick”:http://semantics-online.org/geek/2003/02/fixingbitmappedpostscript_files, but for some reason it didn’t work.]

Update: The download links have changed and the pdf files now display OK.

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