Schedule 78. Studentische Tagung Sprachwissenschaft

This talk examines how so-called “tenseless” languages, which lack obligatory tense morphology, nonetheless anchor events in time. Drawing on data from languages like Mandarin, Yúcatec Maya, and West Greenlandic, I propose a typology of strategies: aspect, modality, adverbials, pragmatic inference, and more unusual devices like nominal tense, that compensate for the absence of overt tense. Engaging with theoretical debates, I argue that no language is truly tenseless at the syntactic level; instead, all languages project a universal TP with a covert T head, with variation lying in how tense surfaces and interacts with aspect and modality.