Morphological tenselessness and SOT: Evidence for a covert relative pronominal tense in Gitksan

Abstract

Gitksan (Tsimshianic) is morphologically tenseless. Simple matrix clauses in Gitksan are compatible with both past and present contexts, and attitude complements and relative clauses are compatible with both simultaneous and back-shifted contexts, similar to the Sequence of Tense (SOT; Comrie, 1985; Enc, 1987) in English. Despite this similarity, an account of SOT in English does not extend to morphologically tenselessness clauses in Gitksan in light of data from before/after clauses. I argue that this in turn supports the existence of a covert non-future tense in Gitksan (Jóhannsdóttir and Matthewson, 2007) and that this tense is specifically a relative pronominal tense. After a brief overview of the Gitksan data (Section 1), I introduce my analysis of SOT in English involving a temporal pronoun with no tense restriction, which I call a ‘tense operator-less’ account (Section 2). This analysis is applied to the puzzling temporal interpretations of present-under-will relative clauses (Abusch, 1998) as well as before/after clauses in English (Section 3). I then introduce data from matrix and embedded clauses in Gitksan (Section 4) and demonstrate the existence of a temporal pronoun as a semantic primitive in the language (Section 5). I develop an analogous tense operator-less account of Gitksan (Section 6), but this account is challenged by data from before/after clauses (Section 7). I argue for an alternative analysis of Gitksan involving a relative pronominal non-future tense (Section 8) and conclude (Section 9).