Contradictory (forward) lifetime effects and the non-future tense in Mandarin Chinese

Sherry Yong Chen,E Matthew Husband

doi:10.3765/plsa.v3i1.4296

Abstract

Lifetime effects refer to the inferences about the life/death of the individual in sentences with individual-level predicates like ‘Mary is/was blue-eyed’. In English, contradictory lifetime inferences arise when the subject denotes one living and one dead individual (e.g. Saussuredead and Chomskyliving #are/??were both linguists.), but no such inferences arises in Mandarin Chinese, a language that has been considered “tenseless” due to the lack of past tense morphemes. This paper investigates the online processing of contradictory lifetime effects and presents additional empirical observations about “forward lifetime effects”, which suggest that both covert past tense and tenseless accounts of Chinese are inadequate for capturing temporal interpretations in this language; instead, finite clauses in Chinese display a Future/Non-Future distinction and are likely to possess a tense node. We discuss our findings in relation to the typology of tense as well as implications for other superficially tenseless languages.

Highlights

The grammatical expression of time has been claimed to be “a universal property of language” (Lecarme, 2004, p. 7), but there are cross-linguistic differences concerning its morpho-syntactic construction
(2) mali zai xue-xi Mary PROG study ‘Mary was/is studying.’. Such cross-linguistic variation brings up several interesting issues: How do English and Chinese differ in terms of temporal interpretation, given that one has overt tense marking and the other does not? Does Chinese have a covert T node even though tense is not morpho-phonologically realized in this language? In this paper, we engage with questions of how different languages encode temporal relations, and how such temporal information is processed during real-time language comprehension
Syntactic tense concerns a tense node in the syntactic structure of a language, which may be realized covertly or overtly: overt tense is achieved via morphological marking, e.g. a tense morpheme, whereas covert tense is phonologically empty but still provides a feature-checking mechanism for tense features, such as [PAST] and [NON-PAST]

Summary

Introduction

The grammatical expression of time has been claimed to be “a universal property of language” (Lecarme, 2004, p. 7), but there are cross-linguistic differences concerning its morpho-syntactic construction. 7), but there are cross-linguistic differences concerning its morpho-syntactic construction. (2) mali zai xue-xi Mary PROG study ‘Mary was/is studying.’ Such cross-linguistic variation brings up several interesting issues: How do English and Chinese differ in terms of temporal interpretation, given that one has overt tense marking and the other does not? Does Chinese have a covert T node even though tense is not morpho-phonologically realized in this language? Syntactic tense concerns a tense node in the syntactic structure of a language, which may be realized covertly or overtly: overt tense is achieved via morphological marking, e.g. a tense morpheme, whereas covert tense is phonologically empty but still provides a feature-checking mechanism for tense features, such as [PAST] and [NON-PAST]. Evidence for semantic tense should be taken to transparently reflect the syntactic structure (transparent mapping hypothesis, a lá Matthewson (2001))

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