Future tense, prospective aspect, and irrealis mood as part of the situation perspective: Insights from Basque, Turkish, and Papuan

Abstract

Beginning with three descriptive case studies from Turkish, Basque, and the Papuan language Iatmul, the chapter identifys structural means to express future time reference in these languages, and the morphosyntactic characteristics, polysemy, and, diachrony of the relevant morphemes and constructions are described. Markers often glossed as ‘future’ are more appropriately labelled ‘prospective’ or ‘irrealis’, while the distinction between prospective aspect and future tense also depends on the extent to which a prospective construction is grammaticalized. While a present prospective can develop into a future, past prospectives tend to take over the function of counterfactual conditionals in the past. Aspect, tense, and mood should therefore be defined as prototype categories within the macro-category ‘situation perspective’. Diachronic shift and synchronic overlap between the micro-categories are a consequence of their being connected by grammaticalization scales. All TAM marking contributes to the situation perspective; while aspect is the closest perspective, epistemic modality is the most distant.

Post-Syntactic Linearization of Yes/No-Question Particle in Turkish

“…The first statement in (11i) mandates that a verb root should concatenate to the most adjacent inflectional morpheme in that order. This is in the same line with the independent observation that verb roots in Turkish are bound: they minimally require at least one overt TAM (i.e., tense, aspect and modality) morpheme to be able to stand alone as a licit verb complex (Jendraschek 2011). This concatenation is thus not surprising, and this is completely expected from the concatenative nature of Turkish.…”

“…The first concatenation statement between the verb root (V) and the most adjacent overt inflectional morpheme (x) hints at a kind of word-minimality. Like many other agglutinative languages, verb roots in Turkish are bound, and require at least one overt inflectional morpheme from the TAM (tense, aspect and modality) domain (Jendraschek 2011). That is, a verb root only with a φ-agreement marking cannot be a licit verb complex that can stand alone.…”

Prospectief aspect in het Nederlands

“…Specifiek wordt dit type aspect wel prospectief genoemd (o.a. Anderson 1973;Comrie 1976;Fleischmann 1983;Dahl 1985;Dik 1997;Jendraschek 2014;Fleischhauer & Gamerschlag 2019;Bogaards & Fleischhauer te verschijnen;Fleischhauer te verschijnen). De cruciale betekenisingrediënten van prospectiviteit zijn volgens Kuteva et al (2019:859-860) 'closeness in time' alsook 'no implication about whether the situation actually occurred or not'.…”