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This paper provides a formal semantic analysis of past interpretation in Medumba (Grassfields Bantu), a graded tense language. Based on original fieldwork, the study explores the empirical behavior and meaning contribution of graded past morphemes in Medumba and relates these to the account of the phenomenon proposed in Cable (Nat Lang Semant 21:219-276, 2013) for GA (c) ky. Investigation reveals that the behavior of Medumba gradedness markers differs from that of their GA (c) ky counterparts in meaningful ways and, more broadly, discourages an analysis as presuppositional eventuality or reference time modifiers. Instead, the Medumba markers are most appropriately analyzed as quantificational tenses. It also turns out that Medumba, though belonging to the typological class of graded tense languages, shows intriguing similarities to genuinely tenseless languages in allowing for temporally unmarked sentences and exploiting aspectual and pragmatic cues for reference time resolution. The more general cross-linguistic implication of the study is that the set of languages often subsumed under the label "graded tense" does not in fact form a natural class and that more case-by-case research is needed to refine this category.
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.