Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Joint work with Hongyuan Sun  (Université de Picardie Jules-Verne)

We investigate constraints on the time reference of embedded clauses in Mandarin, a language with no overt grammatical tense, systematically comparing these constraints to those that hold of the time reference of embedded clauses in English, a language with overt grammatical tense.

We show that:

(i)                  while both complement and relative clauses with bare/aspectually unmarked eventive predicates in Mandarin yield temporal free readings even in intensional contexts

(ii)                both complement and relative clauses with overt perfect(ive) aspectual marking do not allow so called later then the matrix readings in intensional contexts, as is also the case for complement and relative clauses in languages with overt (past) tense, such as English.

(ii), but not (i), conforms to the Upper Limit Constraint )(Abusch 1994) according to which the tense of the embedding clause is an upper bound on the tense of an embedded clause.

The difference in the temporal interpretation of Mandarin bare vs. English past-tensed embedded clauses is not due to a putative contrast between “tenseless” languages (as Mandarin is traditionally assumed to be) and “tensed” languages like English. That is, the source of this temporal freedom of interpretation is not the lack of overt grammatical tense –Mandarin is not Tenseless, it has a silent Non-Future Tense restricting the reference time of bare sentences to Non-Future times (as proposed in Sun 2014)– but rather in the lack of grammatical (overt) Aspect.

We go on to argue that the derivation of temporal construals of embedded clauses provides novel evidence for the Non-Future tense hypothesis (Sun 2014 for Mandarin, initially proposed by Mathewson 2006 for St’át’imcets). In so doing, we provide to our knowledge the first arguments for non-future tense in embedded contexts.