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Lecture: Time Without Tense?

Typological and Theoretical Insights into Tenseless Languages

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.

Info

Day: 2025-11-14
Start time: 16:15
Duration: 00:30
Room: M2.31
Track: Theoretical Linguistics
Language: en

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