Abstract
Reasoning along the lines of Iatridou (2000), we argue in this paper that the Palestinian morpheme kaan that is normally used to express semantic past tense actually denotes Non-Actual Veridicality, i.e. including kaan states that the proposition it applies to is true in a different world-time pair than the pair consisting of the actual world and the time of utterance. This means that kaan can be used both as a tense marker (expressing past tense) and as a mood marker (expressing counterfactuality). Given that every clause (with the possible exception of imperative clauses) must be tensed, this entails that kaan, in the absence of any other tense marker, must receive a temporal interpretation; but if the sentence receives its tense interpretation from some other particle, kaan acts as a mood marker. In the remainder of the paper, several consequences of this proposal are discussed.
Highlights
Palestinian Arabic inflected verbs may come about in two types of forms: one type where the verb exhibits suffixal phi-morphology and where the inflected verb can stand on its own (1); and one type where the verb exhibits prefixal phi-morphology and where the inflected verb cannot stand on its own, but needs further morphological modification by a temporal-aspectual marker (2)-(5).Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 12-1 (2013), 105-119106 Hadil Karawani & Hedde ZeijlstraExamples of the first type are generally referred to as perfective forms, as they always receive a past perfective interpretation
Basing ourselves on Iatridou’s (2000) idea that past tense morphology denotes exclusion of the actual world/time, and building on the idea that the semantic effects of past tense morphology are presuppositional in nature (Ippolito 2003, Sauerland 2009, a.o.), we argue that past tense morphology presupposes Non-Actual Veridicality (NAV), which we define as follows:1 (12) NAV P(w,t) presupposes that w,t.[ =/= & P(w,t)], where t denotes the time of utterance and w the actual world
This means that this past tense morpheme can be used both as a tense marker and as a mood marker
Summary
Palestinian Arabic inflected verbs may come about in two types of forms: one type where the verb exhibits suffixal phi-morphology and where the inflected verb can stand on its own (1); and one type where the verb exhibits prefixal phi-morphology and where the inflected verb cannot stand on its own, but needs further morphological modification by a temporal-aspectual marker (2)-(5). The examples of the second type are referred to as imperfective forms, which, depending on the temporal-aspectual morpheme that modifies them, receive a habitual reading (3-4), a future reading (5) or a progressive reading (6). The bare imperfective form may, be preceded by the past tense morpheme kaan, yielding a past habitual. Modifying the habitual/future imperfective (3) by kaan results in a non-past counterfactual only:. Modifying imperfectives preceded by future marker raħ (4) by kaan yields either a past future or a counterfactual future:. Kaan-modification of the imperfective modified by the progressive marker am only receives a past progressive reading:. We focus on the question as to why the combination kaan plus perfective morphology only yields a counterfactual reading; whereas the contribution of kaan plus the imperfective form is sometimes counterfactual and sometimes plainly temporal.
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