TY  - JOUR
A1  - Mucha, Anne
T1  - Temporal interpretation in hausa
JF  - Linguistics and philosophy : a journal of natural language syntax, semantics, logic, and pragmatics, and processing
N2  - This paper provides a formal analysis of the grammatical encoding of temporal information in Hausa (Chadic, Afro-Asiatic), thereby contributing to the recent debate on temporality in languages without overt tense morphology. By testing the hypothesis of covert tense against recently obtained empirical data, the study yields the result that Hausa is tenseless and that temporal reference is pragmatically inferred from aspectual, modal and contextual information. The second part of the paper addresses the coding of future in particular. It is shown that future time reference in Hausa is realized as a combination of a modal operator and a Prospective aspect marker, involving the modal meaning components of intention and prediction as well as event time shifting. The discussion relates directly to recent approaches to other seemingly tenseless languages such as St'at'imcets (Matthewson, Linguist Philos 29:673-713, 2006) or Paraguayan Guarani (Tonhauser, Linguist Philos 34:257-303, 2011b) and provides further evidence for the suggested analyses of the future markers in these languages.
KW  - Tenseless languages
KW  - Aspect
KW  - Pragmatic principles
KW  - Future
KW  - Modality
KW  - Hausa
Y1  - 2013
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-013-9140-6
SN  - 0165-0157
SN  - 1573-0549
VL  - 36
IS  - 5
SP  - 371
EP  - 415
PB  - Springer
CY  - Dordrecht
ER  -