While tense is a widespread grammatical category, a third of the languages of the world do not encode tense (based on Grambank data). In this course, we will ask how tenseless languages, or languages without the grammatical category of tense, talk about temporal meanings, such as past, present, and future. We will look both at the broad typology of tenselessness and at individual underdescribed languages. While some languages rely primarily on aspectual categories to talk about time, other languages use mood categories, or leave verbs unmarked for TAM (tense, aspect, mood). We will also discuss potential language universals in this domain, e.g. unmarked verbs favoring past and present interpretations over future meanings cross-linguistically. This course is of interest to anyone who is interested in typology, universals, underdescribed languages, semantics, pragmatics, and/or working with fieldwork data.
Die Veranstaltung wurde 2 mal im Vorlesungsverzeichnis SoSe 2026 gefunden:
