Jour : 13 juin 2024

Le mercredi 26 juin 2024, de 10h à 11h, nous recevons Guillaume Guitang (Université libre de Bruxelles), pour une communication sur le système temporel du Gisey (tchadique).

Gizey: (genuinely) tenseless?

Based on a strictly morphological characterization of tense as an inflectional category of the verb, I recently claimed that Gizey is tenseless (see e.g., Guitang 2024), viz., it does not express temporal reference (the relationship between reference time (aka topic time) and utterance time (aka time of speech), see, e.g., Klein 1994) via verbal morphology. In line with this analysis, temporal reference is understood to be marked mainly via temporal adverbs and temporal particles. However, viewpoint aspect, perfective and imperfective, which is marked inflectionally, also tends to constrain temporal reference, mainly past and nonpast, respectively. Now, if paradigmatic aspectual marking can predict temporal reference, can Gizey still be described as tenseless? Note that a tenseless language is generally seen as “a language that does not have paradigmatic expressions that convey a temporal relation between the topic time and the utterance time” (Tonhauser 2015: 132). In this talk, I will first review the evidence that the paradigmatic expression seen on Gizey verbs is aspect and not tense. Then, I will assess Gizey’s tenselessness based on what tenselessness means across different languages.

• Guitang, Guillaume. 2024. A morphosyntactic description of Gizey (Chadic). Brussels: Université libre de Bruxelles PhD dissertation.
• Klein, Wolfgang. 1994. Time in language. London: Routledge.
• Tonhauser, Judith. 2015. Cross-Linguistic Temporal Reference. Annual review of linguistics. Annual Reviews 1(1). 129–154.
  https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguist-030514-124923.

Lien Zoom pour assister au séminaire : https://cnrs.zoom.us/j/95654741763

ID  réunion : 956 5474 1763

Code secret : 81Llacan35