rarum 45: tense not only marked on verbs, but simultaneously on other words too, including nouns (tense agreement?)
Where found
Kayardild, Lardil, Baagandji, Pitta-Pitta (Australian); Titan and perhaps other members of the Admiralty subgroup (Oceanic, Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, Austronesian) Malagasy (West Indonesian, Austronesian)
Domain
morphology: inflection
Subdomain
locus
Keywords
tense, agreement
Type
rarum
Universals violated
none
Source
Nick Evans, Science, vol. 2888, 19 May 2000, p. 1156 (also, for that language, his Kayardild grammar). Hale, Kenneth (1998). A note on Pittapitta nominative case and future tense. Unpublished, MIT. Bowern, Claire & Gülhat Aygen-Tosun (2000). Titan’s tensed prepositions. CLS 36: The Panels, 35-48. Keenan, Edward L. & Maria Polinsky (1998). Malagasy (Austronesian). In Andrew Spencer & Arnold M. Zwicky (eds.), Handbook of Morphology. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 565-568.
Tense on prepositions in Titan and relevant other Admiralty languages is a relic of their verbal past, although synchronically they no longer share other properties with verbs, main or serial. (In other Admiralty languages, such as Loniu or Jabêm, they do.) Elsewhere, serial verbs on the way of becoming adpositions do not seem fond of retaining tense marking.
In Malagasy, tense (past, nonpast) is marked on locative deictics, the locative interrogative pronoun, on some prepositions, adverbs, subordinate conjunctions, agreeing with verbal tenes marking; e.g. h-iresaka ø-amin=dRabe ø-any Antsirabe izy FUT-speak NONPAST-with=Rabe NONPAST-there Antsirabe he ‘he will speak with Rabe in Antsirabe’ n-iresaka t-amin=dRabe t-any Antsirabe izy PAST-speak PAST-with=Rabe PAST-there Antsirabe he ‘he spoke with Rabe in Antsirabe’
Tense on prepositions in Titan and relevant other Admiralty languages is a relic of their verbal past, although synchronically they no longer share other properties with verbs, main or serial. (In other Admiralty languages, such as Loniu or Jabêm, they do.) Elsewhere, serial verbs on the way of becoming adpositions do not seem fond of retaining tense marking.
In Malagasy, tense (past, nonpast) is marked on locative deictics, the locative interrogative pronoun, on some prepositions, adverbs, subordinate conjunctions, agreeing with verbal tenes marking; e.g.
h-iresaka ø-amin=dRabe ø-any Antsirabe izy
FUT-speak NONPAST-with=Rabe NONPAST-there Antsirabe he
‘he will speak with Rabe in Antsirabe’
n-iresaka t-amin=dRabe t-any Antsirabe izy
PAST-speak PAST-with=Rabe PAST-there Antsirabe he
‘he spoke with Rabe in Antsirabe’
See
#43 (tense and definiteness).