Temporal uses of definite articles and demonstratives in Pomak (Slavic, Greece)

An experimental approach to nominal tense: Evidence from Pomak (Slavic)

“…The Pomak experimental data support the claim that nominal tense can provide temporal information independently of verbal tense (e.g. Nordlinger & Sadler 2004, Adamou 2011, Lecarme 2012. The results, however, indicate that lexical and pragmatic association to past and future made the temporal interpretation more accurate.…”

“…In Pomak, as in any other Indo-European language, tense is expressed through verb inflection and temporal adverbs. However, Adamou (2011) has argued that, in Pomak, tense is also morphologically encoded for common nouns through a series of deictic suffixes. These deictic suffixes are used in the formation of definite articles, demonstratives, possessive pronouns, relative pronouns, and temporal subordinators.…”

“…(Adamou 2011:881) c. gjuˈʒlutʃi-ne [ˈʒoe-ne ˈnosi] ˈjatse sa ˈhubavi glasses-def.dist [pro.rel-def.dist wear.3sg very be.3pl nice 'The glasses [away from both of us] that he/she is wearing are very nice.' When the referents are located in a space and time frame distinct from the utterance situation, Adamou (2011) argues that the t-suffix and the n-suffix also serve to encode nominal tense. According to this analysis, the t-suffix is used when the time of the NP is located in the past with respect to the time of the utterance.…”

“…(as part of a fictional narrative) Adamou (2011) further observes that the temporal reference of the main clause generally coincides with the temporal reference of the noun phrase, but not necessarily. To illustrate the independence of nominal tense with respect to verbal tense, Adamou (2011) provides an example with the adjective 'former', presented in 6. In this example the verb is in the future, but the article with the t-suffix (in the masculine singular) agrees with the lexical semantics of the adjective 'former' and locates the utterance in the past, at a time when the property 'my husband' was true of an individual (i.e.…”

“…Adamou (2011) argues that these uses are not merely distal (i.e. an object away from us), and notes that irrealis is additionally marked in Pomak through the use of a specific temporal subordinator aˈga 'when (no anchoring in the situation of utterance)', contrasting with aˈga-no 'when (future in relation to the situation of utterance), whenever', with the neuter definite article and the n-suffix, and aˈga-to 'when (past in relation to the situation of utterance)', with the t-suffix.…”