The Prominence Of Tense Aspect And Mood

In this monograph, the author argues that natural languages exemplify the language type by assigning prominence to just one of the three verbal categories of tense, aspect and mood.

This volume in memory of Terry Crowley covers a wide range of languages: Australian, Oceanic, Pidgins and Creoles, and varieties of English. Part I, Linguistic Description and Typology, includes chapters on topics such as complex predicates and verb serialization, noun incorporation, possessive classifiers, diphthongs, accent patterns, modals in Australian English and directional terms in atoll-based languages. Part II, Historical Linguistics and Linguistic History, ranges from the reconstruction of Australian languages, to reflexes of Proto-Oceanic, to the lexicon of early Melanesian Pidgin. Part III, Language Development and Linguistic Applications, comprises studies of lexicography, language in education, and language endangerment and language revival, spanning the Pacific from South Australia and New Zealand to Melanesia and on to Colombia. The volume will whet the appetite of anyone interested in the latest linguistic research in this richly multilingual part of the globe.

In this volume, Ken M. Penner uses an empirical method to establish that the Qumran authors’ selection of finite verb forms is determined not by aspect, but by tense or modality.

For the past 25 years, debate regarding the nature of tense and aspect in the Koine Greek verb has held New Testament studies at an impasse. The Greek Verb Revisited examines recent developments from the field of linguistics, which may dramatically shift the direction of this discussion. Readers will find an accessible introduction to the foundational issues, and more importantly, they will discover a way forward through the debate. Originally presented during a conference on the Greek verb supported by and held at Tyndale House and sponsored by the Faculty of Divinity of Cambridge University, the papers included in this collection represent the culmination of scholarly collaboration. The outcome is a practical and accessible overview of the Greek verb that moves beyond the current impasse by taking into account the latest scholarship from the fields of linguistics, Classics, and New Testament studies.

In the context of current research on grammaticalization phenomena, this book offers a synchronic explanation of the verbal system of the Aramaic of Daniel that is coherent with the diachronic development of Aramaic and of human languages in general.

This book presents a description of the grammar of Zhoutun, an endangered Sinitic variety spoken by less than 1000 people in the Qinghai Province of northwest China. With vocabulary predominantly from Chinese and Tibetan syntax, Zhoutun is one of the Sinitic varieties most distant from Standard Chinese, with unexpected typological features like, for example, case markers, rigid SOV word order, simplified tonal system, negative copula as a disjunctive coordinator and "locutor-referential pronoun" which is not found in Chinese and in many languages. Zhoutun is also a representative variety of the Gansu-Qinghai linguistic area in which Mongolic and Turkic languages coexist with Tibetan and Chinese dialects from a long time. This book also describes the sociolinguistic and sociohistorical contexts of Zhoutun. It should be of interest to specialists and students of language contact, linguistic typology, Chinese dialectology, language geography, anthropological linguistics, sociolinguistics, folklore studies, and preservation of endangered languages.

This book reconstructs the synchronic system of tense and aspect in Old Japanese. Watanabe takes a fundamentally different approach from previous analyses by examining the syntactic distribution of temporal suffixes in Manyōshū, an eighth-century poetry collection.

The grammatical category of (sentence) mood has been of central interest to many branches of linguistics, including linguistic typology and systemic functional linguistics. This book is a successful integration of the typological and systemic functional approaches to mood, aiming to investigate the commonalities and variations across languages in both mood system and mood structure. To this aim, it establishes a geographically, genetically and typologically representative sample of 60 languages and provides detailed systemic functional descriptions of the mood system and mood structure of these languages. Based on such descriptions, it makes cross-linguistic comparisons of the mood system and mood structure of the languages in the sample. Structurally, it explores the cross-linguistic commonalities and variations in (i) the realizations of some major functional elements in mood structure, (ii) the realizations of mood options and (iii) the realizations of mood system. Systemically, it investigates how languages resemble and vary from each other in (i) the subtypes of major mood types, (ii) the organization of mood system and (iii) the semantic dimensions along which mood system is elaborated further in delicacy. Moreover, building on the descriptions and comparisons, it makes some generalizations about the structural and systemic features of mood and proposes some tentative explanations for the commonalities and variations languages display in mood system and mood structure. This book is an empirical and holistic approach to the typology of mood and contributes to a deeper understanding of the grammatical category. It is of special interest to systemic functional linguists, typologists, grammarians and descriptive linguists.