The past tense in Assamese

Abstract

The present paper investigates the past tense in Assamese from a Cognitive Linguistics point of view. We notice that the present is unmarked whereas the past and future are marked for tense in Assamese. In the traditional linguistic literature of Assamese such as Kakati (1995), U. N. Goswami (1997), Bharali (2000) and G. C. Goswami (2000), the morpheme - il is identified as the past tense marker in the language. In designating - il as the past tense marker the contrast between “past” and “past with present relevance” is, however, missed. On the contrary, the current paper argues that the past tense in Assamese is marked by - isil, and not by - il. An adverbial test with the time adverb eimātra ‘just now’ is applied to establish that - isil, not - il, is the past marker. Dahl (1985) and Bybee et al. (1994) observed that the past is a cross linguistic category and is predominantly marked morphologically. It may be noted that Assamese is not an exception to this observation. The paper also argues that the ‘be’ verb form āsil ‘existed’ is not ās combined - il; but is rather ās combined - isil and is a phonologically reduced form of ās-isil. The paper then examines past habituality and remoteness distinction in past in Assamese; and it is found that - isil combined thāk ‘stay’ generates past habitual meaning whereas Assamese does not maintain any remoteness distinction in past.