The implicatures of optional past tense in Tlingit and the implications for ‘discontinuous past’

Abstract

In many languages, past-marking on stative predicates has been reported to trigger an inference of ‘cessation,’ that the past state in question does not hold at the present (Altshuler and Schwarzschild 2013, 2014). In English and many other languages, this inference can be shown to be defeasible, and so is therefore non-semantic. However, in other languages—such as the Tlingit language (Na-Dene; Alaska, British Columbia, Yukon)—the cessation inference of past-marked statives cannot be cancelled in the same way. This has lead some to propose that in these latter languages, the cessation inference is semantic, and is lexically encoded into the meaning of the past marker (Leer 1991; Copley 2005). Such a view would, of course, broaden the range of semantic tenses that exist in the world’s languages, to include a sub-category some have dubbed ‘Discontinuous Past’ (Plungian and van der Auwera 2006). Through in-depth investigation of one such putative ‘discontinuous past’ marker in the Tlingit language, I argue that—to the contrary—these morphemes are in their lexical semantics simply (plain) past tenses. On the basis of original field data I show that—while the cessation inferences of Tlingit are different from English-style ‘cessation implicatures’—they are nevertheless still defeasible, and so non-semantic. I develop an account of the cessation inference in Tlingit, whereby it arises from the optionality of the past-tense marker in question. I argue that this account should be extended to all putative instances of ‘Discontinuous Past,’ since it would capture the fact that putative cases of ‘Discontinuous Past’ only ever arise in optional tense languages.