Syntactic Environments Research Articles

The rise and fall of a minor category

Some languages use a special form of the noun, a “numerative”, after some or all numerals. In such languages, a distinct numerative is typically not available for all nouns, but rather only for a small subset, forming a morphological “minor category” (Corbett 2000). We examine how such a system emerges and disintegrates diachronically, looking in detail at Welsh, a language in which a distinct numerative emerged as the result of the phonological attrition of plural suffixes and analogical extension of new plural suffixes to all relevant syntactic environments except after numerals. Nouns with distinct numeratives tend to be animate and to denote units frequently counted, an association previously noted also for minor duals (Plank 1996). We suggest that this association arose in Welsh via differential analogical extension in two directions: animates resisted analogical extension of the pattern numeral + singular noun; and animates were most receptive to extension of the pattern numeral + numerative. We show that the loss of the numerative proceeded the same way in reverse: numeratives were first reanalyzed as special plurals, and this pattern, numeral + plural noun, resisted analogical spread of the dominant numeral + singular pattern most robustly with kinship terms and a unit of time, namely ‘year’. These developments show much commonality with other cases where the diachrony of the numerative is known, confirming the observation that numeratives typically emerge from the disintegration of a major category, such as plural or dual, and that they are diachronically unstable, liable ultimately to analogical elimination.

La cartografía del <em>yiqtol</em> corto en hebreo bíblico

This paper provides a dynamic (i.e. cognitive, typological and grammaticalization driven) analysis of short yiqtol in Biblical Hebrew. The author argues that short yiqtol can be understood as a coherent construction if it is modeled as a wave – a synchronic two-dimensional map whose components are related cognitively (as visualized by the x axis) and specified for their degree of prototypicality (as visualized by the y axis). The evidence demonstrates that short yiqtol should be classified as a gram that travels a modal-contamination path. Its contamination originated in a deontic context of speaker modality (both affirmative and negative), subsequently extended to subordinate uses (goal) and future values (first in apodoses and next in other syntactic environments). In Biblical Hebrew, the zone of prototypicality includes deontic senses. The value of goal constitutes the secondary peak of prototypicality. The sense of futurity is non-prototypical.

On the (non)-existence of verb-stranding ellipsis in Chinese

This paper develops the empirical and theoretical basis for the necessity in admitting the operation of verb-stranding ellipsis (VVPE) in Chinese. I present new arguments showing that, though two analytic possibilities — null argument analysis and VVPE analysis — are in principle available in the grammar of Chinese, they can be differentiated in specific syntactic environments. In particular, I show that the existing null argument approaches would have difficulty in accounting for the following facts: disjunction of multi-constituent elements under negation, the difference of island effects in the presence of a linguistic antecedent, the verb identity requirement and the possibility of having part of the idiomatic expression as the missing gap. Therefore, it is argued that VVPE must remain a viable syntactic operation in Chinese when a null object analysis is unavailable.

The Semantic Values of AÐE and LA in Ewe

Aɖe and la have multiple functions which are often realized by the position they occupy in various syntactic environments in Ewe, a Kwa language. Aɖe can function as an indefinite marker, a partitive marker or an indefinite pronoun. La can function as a definite marker, an agentive suffix, or a terminal particle. As a terminal particle, la occurs at the end of preposed adverbial phrases and nominal phrases, embedded relative clauses which are postposed to the nominal heads, and other dependent clauses in Ewe constructions. Using the Givenness Hierarchy, this study argues that regardless of the different syntactic environments in which these particles occur, each of them has a univocal value semantically: the use of aɖe and la encode the cognitive statuses ‘referential’ and ‘uniquely identifiable’ respectively in Ewe.Keywords: Particles, Indefiniteness, Definiteness, Referential, Uniquely Identifiable

Non-specificity in disguise: morphology – semantics mismatches in Old Portuguese nominal items

The present inquiry has been spurred by the observation of the morphological behaviour of nominal items in medieval Portuguese codices (the 13th and 14th centuries). Individuals subject to legal regulations, besides being denoted by various configurations of common nouns, are identified also by first-person pronouns. Both kinds of nominal items occur nearly exclusively in singular in defiance of the fact that norms are designed to apply to an unrestricted number of potential addressees. A series of parameters converge to explain this form-function mismatch: type of inflection (inherent vs. contextual), text genre characteristics and syntactic environment (conditional protases). The pervasiveness of the singular in each type of these nominal items is traced back to non-specificity. Out of two competing patterns accounting for instances of (non-) variation in nominal morphology, Definiteness Hierarchy is given preference over degrees of animacy: non-specifically used items, even if highly ranked on animacy scale (e.g. personal pronouns), are the least likely to surface as plural forms. Therefore, a slight modification to the inventory of elements listed in the Definiteness Hierarchy is proposed.

Aspectual variation in Lithuanian copular constructions

In this article an attempt is made to pinpoint all possibilities of expressing aspectual meanings in Lithuanian copular constructions. The author departs from the tradition of distinguishing only perfective vs. imperfective aspect in Lithuanian. Instead, in testing various possibilities of expressing aspect in the constructions under discussion, the relevant meanings are chosen from a wider range of aspectual grams established in recent typological work on aspect.Until now the aspect of copular constructions had remained an understudied and underdescribed topic not only in Lithuanian. This is because the main concern of linguists has been with general problems of predication (or identification) in equative structures. Researchers (mainly of the formal persuasion) have based their accounts on copular sentences where the copula “be”, more specifically its present tense form, is taken to be the default case. Of course such ‘default’ copular constructions deliver an unproblematic aspectual meaning, that of imperfective state. Empirically, however, present tense (or zero) copulas are the default instance only in the case of identificational equatives, for identity statements typically assert general truths that are ‘timeless’ or ‘omnitemporal’. As this research has shown, the remaining types of copular constructions have a much wider potential for choosing the desired aspectual meaning. First of all, the functional−structural properties of these constructions and the contexts in which they are used provide much more space for aspect−tense variation in their copular verbs than in the default cases of identificational equatives. Secondly, the aspectual properties of the copular construction can be changed externally by introducing, at clausal level, specialized adverbials or periphrastic aspectual constructions, such as jau ‘already’, du kartus ‘twice’, buvo be-tampąs, bet… ‘he was about to become, but…’ etc.; in this case the aspectual interpretation of the copula is coerced in line with the overall aspectual profile of the construction. Thirdly, the range of aspectual meanings in the copular constructions becomes even wider if we take into account other copulas than “be”, viz. those of dynamic or locative origin. The typological research of recent decades in this field (Stassen 1997; Pustet 2003) has shown that cross-linguistically it is not unusual for copulas to be grammaticalized from different lexical sources. One may reasonably suppose that one of the motives for including new lexemes in the class of copulas was the need of expressing relevant aspectual meanings in the predication of identity, i.e. in various types of copular constructions. So languages tend to have, in addition to their main copula, a small number of verbs that can qualify as copulas and that mainly serve the needs of aspectual expression in their constructions. In Lithuanian these copular verbs are tapti, pasidaryti / darytis ‘become’, virsti ‘turn into’, likti ‘remain’. Depending on their tense and syntactic environment, ‘dynamic’ copulas can express ingressive, progressive or habitual aspect. The copula likti denotes continuation of the profiled situation, as does the prefixed form tebe-būti (tebe-(nebe-) being the usual marker of (phasal / aspectual) continuative meaning in Lithuanian).In the article due attention is also paid to the aspectual properties of the different types of copular constructions. In his earlier works the author has provided a new classification based on the idea of type instantiation, developed by Ronald Langacker (1991). In the second section of this paper these types are briefly passed in review, but the classification is updated and enriched with new discussion. The main idea behind the new classification is that all types of copular constructions are treated as instantiations of one archetype, that of the identity relation. What distinguishes these constructional types is the syntactic class of their predicative complements (adjective vs. noun) and additionally, in the case of predicative nominals, their referential properties. Before turning, in the fourth section, to a discussion of concrete aspectual meanings as expressed in different types of copular constructions, the author first makes a brief excursion, in the third section, to the typology of strategies for encoding predicatives as defined in Leon Stassen’s comprehensive typological study on intransitive predication (1997). This seemed necessary as one may suspect that variation in this domain of morphosyntactic encoding is to a great extent motivated by the need of expressing additional aspectual meanings in the constructions under discussion.

Evidential adverbials in Lithuanian: a corpus-based study

The present study examines the functional distribution of the adverbials akivaizdžiai ‘evidently’, aiškiai ‘clearly’, ryškiai ‘visibly/clearly’, tariamai ‘allegedly/supposedly’ and aišku ‘clearly/of course’ in Lithuanian fiction and academic discourse. The aim of the study is to identify the evidential and/or pragmatic functions of perception and communication-based adverbials which can be traced synchronically to different syntactic environment (a predication manner adverbial and a CTP clause). The paper examines the frequency of these adverbials, their position, scope, functions, co-occurrence with argumentative markers, word class (adverb or non-agreeing adjective) and the type of discourse they occur in. The research is conducted by applying a corpus-based methodology and the data are obtained from the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language, namely from the subcorpus of fiction, and the Corpus of Academic Lithuanian. The perception-based adverbials akivaizdžiai ‘evidently’, aiškiai ‘clearly’, ryškiai ‘clearly/visibly’ and aišku ‘clearly/of course’ denote inferences drawn from perceptual and conceptual evidence and contribute to persuasive authorial argumentation, while the communication-based adverbial tariamai ‘allegedly/supposedly’ functions as a hearsay marker. The latter may also be used as an epistemic marker which refers to unreal or imagined situations. In contexts of common knowledge, the adverbial aišku ‘clearly/of course’ acquires interactional and textual functions and thus reveals traces of pragmaticalisation. In academic discourse, it signals interaction with the addressee and links units of discourse, while in fiction it functions as a speech act modifier in a variety of emotive contexts. The pragmaticalisation of aišku ‘clearly/of course’ is also marked by its high frequency, positional mobility (initial, medial, final) and scopal variability (clausal, phrasal). Alongside its discrete evidential and pragmatic functions, the adverbial aišku ‘clearly/of course’ displays the merger of the two functions. The adverbials akivaizdžiai ‘evidently’, aiškiai ‘clearly’, ryškiai ‘visibly/clearly’ and tariamai ‘allegedly/supposedly’ do not acquire a pragmatic function, which is indicated by their frequency and position. The results of the present study corroborate the findings of previous studies that common sources of evidential adverbials and pragmatic markers in Lithuanian are verb-based, adjective-based and noun-based CTP clauses.

Inflection – semantics interfaces in a typological setting: number and non-specific nominal items in Old Spanish legal codices

Abstract Mikołaj Nkollo & Magdalena Tkaczyk. Inflection - semantics interfaces in a typological setting: number and non-specific nominal items in Old Spanish legal codices. The Poznań Society for the Advancement of Arts and Sciences, PL ISSN 0079-4740, pp. 17-29 The present inquiry has been spurred by the observation of the morphological behaviour of human-denoting common nouns in Old Spanish codices (13th to 15th century). In spite of the fact that legal norms are designed to apply to an unrestricted number of potential addressees, this class of nominal items surfaces nearly exclusively in the singular, with plural forms being strongly underrepresented. A series of parameters converge to account for this form - function mismatch, thus revealing an essentially interdependent nature of linguistic mechanisms underlying it: type of inflection (inherent vs. contextual), text genre characteristics (distance pole vs proximate pole) and syntactic environment (conditional protases). The pervasiveness of the singular is traced back to non-specificity. Out of two mutually exclusive typological clines accounting for the likelihood of inflectional variation in noun morphology, Definiteness Hierarchy is given preference over degrees of animacy: non-specifically used items, even if highly ranked on animacy scale, are the least likely to surface as plural forms. Competing motivations are assumed to provide a suitable analytical framework to account for typological conflicts such as the one exemplified in Old Spanish legal codices.

Optional opacity: A syntactically-based analysis of early Hebrew verb morphology

The study aims to account for the distribution of finite versus non-finite verbs during a developmental period when children use both types of verb forms in contexts requiring finiteness. To meet this goal, longitudinal samples from three Hebrew-acquiring children (aged 1;4–2;6) are examined from the onset of verb production and across the ‘optional’ period in which finite and non-finite verbs occur side by side. Each verb-containing utterance is specified for structural transparency (whether the verb has a clearly unambiguous target) and for additional clausal constituents. Analysis reveals that during the ‘optional’ period non-transparent verb forms favor elaborated syntactic environments (i.e., accompanied by objects and/or adverbs) at significantly higher rates than their transparent counterparts. These morpho-syntactic patterns in children’s verb usage provide a line of explanation for the distribution of inflected versus non-inflected forms, and highlight the role of between-domain inter-relations in language acquisition.

Of nouns, and kinds, and properties, and why one D is null or not

AbstractThis paper assumes that the basic denotation of nouns can be that of kind or property and that the determiner system of a language is a direct consequence of this cross-linguistic variation. An analysis of how definiteness and specificity are marked across three languages with different determiner systems, namely, English, French and Mauritian Creole (MC), provides evidence of the co-relation between noun denotation and determiner system. Languages with kind denoting nouns (English and MC) admit bare nominal arguments, which are barred in French, whose nouns denote properties. However, English and MC differ in that English has an overt definite article, which is a lacking in MC. This null element requires licensing by an overt specificity marker in some syntactic environments. The English and MC definite articles are analyzed as operators that quantify over sets of kind denoting nouns, and they serve a different function from the French definite article, which is specified for number and selects properties.

Copular Constructions and Asymmetries in the Specificational Pseudocleft Constructions in Korean

The noun kes, occurring in many syntactic environments, can introduce the so-called pseudocleft constructions in Korean. This paper discusses the animacy asymmetry we find in the Korean pseudocleft constructions and suggests that the explanation for such asymmetry follows from the proper interpretation of specificational pseudocleft constructions as well as their information structure properties.

The polysemy of the Spanish verb sentir: A behavioral profile analysis

AbstractThis study investigates the intricate polysemy of the Spanish perception verbsentir(‘feel’) which, analogous to the more-studied visual perception verbsver(‘see’) andmirar(‘look’), also displays an ample gamut of semantic uses in various syntactic environments. The investigation is based on a corpus-based behavioral profile (BP) analysis. Besides its methodological merits as a quantitative, systematic and verifiable approach to the study of meaning and to polysemy in particular, the BP analysis offers qualitative usage-based evidence for cognitive linguistic theorizing. With regard to the polysemy ofsentir, the following questions were addressed: (1) What is the prototype of each cluster of senses? (2) How are the different senses structured: how many senses should be distinguished – i.e., which senses cluster together and which senses should be kept separately? (3) Which senses are more related to each other and which are highly distinguishable? (4) What morphosyntactic variables make them more or less distinguishable? The results show that two significant meaning clusters can be distinguished, which coincide with the division between the middle voice uses (sentirse) and the other uses (sentir). Within these clusters, a number of meaningful subclusters emerge, which seem to coincide largely with the more general semantic categories of physical, cognitive and emotional perception.

Structural constraints on pronoun binding and coreference: evidence from eye movements during reading.

A number of recent studies have investigated how syntactic and non-syntactic constraints combine to cue memory retrieval during anaphora resolution. In this paper we investigate how syntactic constraints and gender congruence interact to guide memory retrieval during the resolution of subject pronouns. Subject pronouns are always technically ambiguous, and the application of syntactic constraints on their interpretation depends on properties of the antecedent that is to be retrieved. While pronouns can freely corefer with non-quantified referential antecedents, linking a pronoun to a quantified antecedent is only possible in certain syntactic configurations via variable binding. We report the results from a judgment task and three online reading comprehension experiments investigating pronoun resolution with quantified and non-quantified antecedents. Results from both the judgment task and participants' eye movements during reading indicate that comprehenders freely allow pronouns to corefer with non-quantified antecedents, but that retrieval of quantified antecedents is restricted to specific syntactic environments. We interpret our findings as indicating that syntactic constraints constitute highly weighted cues to memory retrieval during anaphora resolution.

Old English Negators as Equivalents of a Clause

In this article an attempt is made to find out how Old English (OE) negators vary in responses to polar questions and in polar-alternative questions, and how the negators function as reaction signals to express denial and refusal in OE prose. The corpus consists of all the occurrences of the negators na, nateshwon, nese and nic in the prose texts and glosses of the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus (DOEC), supplemented with a select sample of occurrences of the particle ne. The data are analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively. Despite the low number of occurrences of the five negators in polar answers, polar-alternative questions and as reaction signals, my study shows certain patterns in which the negators occur in the material. The results indicate that the negators are not intersubstitutable. Variation among the negators is mainly due to the immediate, syntactic environment in which the negator occurs. In addition, the variation is diatopic and genre-based rather than diachronic. The majority of the examples come from Latin-based texts.

An English-Norwegian contrastive analysis of downtoners, more or less

In this paper we present a contrastive study of the downtoners more or less and mer eller mindre. After establishing that these two binomials have developed along similar paths in English and Norwegian, can be found to occur in the same syntactic environments in the two languages and, indeed, have the same meanings, we seek explanations as to why they are not used as translations of each other in the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus to the extent that would be expected of two such seemingly perfect matches. The picture that emerges is a complex one. First, more or less is much more frequent than mer eller mindre, both in source (original) and target (translation) texts. Next, more or less corresponds to many more Norwegian expressions in the data, than vice versa, signalling a wider repertoire of use than its Norwegian counterpart. Finally, mer eller mindre is used as a premodifier and as a degree adjunct in approximately the same number of instances, while the degree adjunct use is dominant in the English data for more or less. The paper introduces the reverse mutual correspondence measure to complement the more established mutual correspondence measure, introduced by Altenberg (1999), to add another dimension to contrastive analysis based on bidirectional translation corpus data.

Of nouns, and kinds, and properties, and why one D is null or not

This paper assumes that the basic denotation of nouns can be that of kind or property and that the determiner system of a language is a direct consequence of this cross-linguistic variation. An analysis of how definiteness and specificity are marked across three languages with different determiner systems, namely, English, French and Mauritian Creole (MC), provides evidence of the co-relation between noun denotation and determiner system. Languages with kind denoting nouns (English and MC) admit bare nominal arguments, which are barred in French, whose nouns denote properties. However, English and MC differ in that English has an overt definite article, which is a lacking in MC. This null element requires licensing by an overt specificity marker in some syntactic environments. The English and MC definite articles are analyzed as operators that quantify over sets of kind denoting nouns, and they serve a different function from the French definite article, which is specified for number and selects properties.

Verbal allocutivity in a crosslinguistic perspective

AbstractAllocutivity is a term coined to describe a phenomenon in Basque whereby, in certain pragmatic (and syntactic) circumstances, an addressee who is not an argument of the verb is systematically encoded in all declarative main clause conjugated verb forms. Although the term has been exclusively applied to Basque, similar phenomena are found in other languages as well. Indeed, despite certain differences in the degree of grammaticalization and usage, allocutive verb forms are attested in at least Pumé (isolate; Venezuela), Nambikwara (isolate; Brazil), Mandan (Siouan; North America), and Beja (Cushitic; Northeast Africa). The aim of this article is to propose a typology of verbal allocutivity in a crosslinguistic perspective, taking into consideration the locus of encoding, the manner in which it is encoded, the information concerning the addressee which is encoded, and the syntactic environments in which it can appear.

Diacronia e sujeito nulo no português brasileiro: um estudo comparativo

Nesse trabalho foi elaborado um estudo comparativo-diacrônico a respeito do uso do sujeito nulo no PB e no PE, a partir de um corpus composto por jornais que circularam na primeira e segunda metade do século 19 e na primeira metade do século 20 nas cidades de Ouro Preto no Estado de Minas Gerais/Brasil e na cidade de Évora no Distrito de Évora/ Portugal. Os jornais utilizados para este estudo foram os seguintes: O Recreador Mineiro (1845-1848); O Jornal Mineiro (1897-1900) e Tribuna de Ouro Preto (1945-1948) no Brasil e Illustração luzo-brasileira (1856-1858); O Manuelinho de Évora (1890-1898) e Notícias de Évora (1945-1948). Para efetuar as descrições dos fenômenos estudados, foram analisadas mais de 14 mil sentenças desse corpus. Nosso objetivo neste artigo foi o de averiguar e descrever a relação entre o sujeito nulo na diacronia do PB, através de um estudo comparativo com dados do PE. Os resultados quantitativos mostraram que a gramática do PB teria sofrido uma mudança no que diz respeito ao uso de sujeito nulo: perdido a característica de uma língua de sujeito nulo consistente e adquirido propriedades de uma língua com sujeito nulo parcial. Verificou-se nos dados um alto preenchimento do sujeito com o decorrer do tempo por meio de uma estratégia que denominamos de Sujeito Lexical Anáforico. A mudança de gramática de sujeito nulo entre o PB e o PE foi constatada em nossos dados à medida que o número de sujeito nulos encontrados em PE permaneceu com alta frequência de uso em todos os períodos e ambientes sintáticos analisados. Além disso, o PE não apresentou qualquer necessidade de uso de estratégias de preenchimento como foi atestado em PB. A realização do sujeito nulo com primeira pessoa apresentou um comportamento diferenciado do sujeito nulo de terceira pessoa nos dados do PB, o que reforça a hipótese de o PB ser uma língua de sujeito nulo parcial.

Structured treatment can improve predicate argument structure impairment

Background: Complementation information is a type of lexical-syntactic information that determines which syntactic environments a verb can be inserted into. It includes information about the verb’s predicate argument structure (PAS), the thematic role of each argument, and the verb’s subcategorisation frames. Complementation information might be impaired in aphasia. Various procedures have been used in treatment studies aimed at improving the production of verbs or sentences (including the verb with its arguments); these have usually yielded an improvement in treated verbs, without generalisation to untreated verbs.Aims: In this study, we evaluated a structured treatment procedure, aimed at improving impaired PAS information, and examined whether it improved the production of verbs with their arguments in sentences. The research questions were these: (a) Will treatment improve the production of verbs with their arguments in sentences? (b) Will improvement generalise to untreated verbs? (c) Will improvement be maintained after the end of the treatment? and (d) Will improvement generalise to connected speech (in a task of telling a story in response to a series of pictures)?Methods & Procedures: Two chronic aphasic patients with impairment in PAS information participated in the study. Their complementation information, and specifically their PAS information, was assessed prior to treatment, immediately after treatment, and in follow-ups 6 weeks and 6 months after treatment. The treatment consisted of instruction and practice on the number of arguments different verbs select, and taught the participants a strategy they could use. The practice was organised hierarchically, with regard to the number of arguments a given verb requires and the amount of cueing given.Outcomes & Results: Following treatment, a significant improvement was found in the participants’ ability to produce sentences with the correct number of arguments. This improvement was generalised to untreated verbs and to connected speech and maintained for (at least) 6 months after treatment. However, neither participant showed improvement in other language skills, or even in other types of complementation information (i.e., subcategorisation frames).Conclusions: The findings suggest that structured treatment focusing on PAS information can improve the use of this specific type of information, manifested in the production of sentences including the verb with its arguments. Theoretically, the findings support the view that complementation information is represented separately from other types of language information, and they suggest that different types of complementation information might be represented separately.

Nominal tense and temporal implicatures: evidence from Mbyá

In this paper, I discuss the distribution and the interpretation of the temporal suffix -kue in Mbya, a Guarani language that is closely related to Paraguayan Guarani. This suffix is attested both inside noun phrases and inside clauses. Interestingly, its nominal uses give rise to inferences that are unattested in its clausal uses. These inferences were first identified in Paraguayan Guarani by Tonhauser (PhD thesis, 2006; Language 83:831–869, 2007), who called them the existence property and the change of state property. Tonhauser further argued that these properties are built into the lexical entry of the nominal temporal marker -kue. By contrast, I argue that -kue denotes a relative past tense both in its nominal and clausal uses, and that the existence and change of state properties are pragmatic inferences that arise from the interaction of the literal meaning of -kue with general constraints on the interpretation of noun phrases, notably constraints on the topicality of the time of evaluation of noun phrases. This allows me to maintain a uniform analysis of -kue across its nominal uses and its clausal uses. The analysis of -kue in Mbya is relevant to a number of current debates on the expression of tense crosslinguistically. Firstly, the existence of relative tenses has sometimes been called into question. Klein (Time in language, 1994) notably argues that relative tenses are actually combinations of tense with the perfect aspect. Others have argued that there exist true relative tenses in certain languages (see e.g. Bohnemeyer, NLLT 1–38, 2013). I argue that facts of Mbya support the latter view. Secondly, Klein (1994) famously defined tenses as relations between topic times and the time of utterance. I argue, on the other hand, that relative tenses only denote relations between times, and that the topicality or non-topicality of their temporal arguments depends on their context of use, including their syntactic environment. Thirdly, this paper contributes to debates on the nature and reality of nominal tenses (see Nordlinger and Sadler, Language 80:776–806, 2004; Lecarme, In: Binnick (ed) The Oxford handbook of tense and aspect, 2012), by arguing that tense in Mbya is a genuinely nominal category, in the sense that temporal functional projections are part of the extended projection of the noun phrase.