Towards an Understanding of the Meaning of Nominal Tense

Abstract

Paraguayan Guaran´? has nominal inflectional suffixes with temporal meanings. I challenge the claim that they are nominal tenses (cf. Nordlinger and Sadler 2004), and analyze them as nominal aspects. I present evidence that points to crosslinguistic variation in the way in which noun phrases are temporally interpreted, and address the implications of the existence of languages with nominal temporal markers for theories of temporality and crosslinguistic temporal interpretation.