Temporal perspective and its formal background: An explanation for aspectual synonymy between simple and analytic past tenses in Mari

Abstract

This paper examines and explains perspective-based temporal variation between simple and analytic past tenses in Mari narration. In current research, the analytic past tenses are presented as aspectually synonymous with the simple past tense 2, implicating that there is no functional distinction between these morphologically very dissimilar operators. To overcome the apparent shortages of the purely aspectual approach, this paper dismantles the tenses into their morphosemantic ingredients and explains their exact functions by their form, giving hence also new light to the development of the items. As will be shown, the reason for tense variation is the position of perspective time, a temporal vantage point from which an event is seen. The simple past tense 2 sets the perspective time outside of the story line, while the analytic tenses locate it inside the narrative world, which affects the temporal and non-temporal structure of the discourse. Crucially, the concept of perspective is inherently built in the structure of the tenses: I will argue, that the “auxiliary” of the analytic tenses is de facto a deictic particle developed for temporal manipulation of events, and its application in anaphoric narration creates internal complexity to the story. The “pastness” of the simple past tense 2, in contrast, is anaphoric by nature, which makes narrations structured with it temporally one-dimensional.