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When is a temporal marker not a tense? Reply to Tonhauser 2007

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Rachel Nordlinger  and
Louisa Sadler
Rachel Nordlinger*
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne
Louisa Sadler*
Affiliation:
University of Essex
*
Nordlinger School of Languages and Linguistics University of Melbourne Victoria 3010 Australia [racheln@unimelb.edu.au]
Sadler Department of Language and Linguistics University of Essex Wivenhoe Park Colchester CO4 3SQ Essex United Kingdom [louisa@essex.ac.uk]
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Extract

In her recent Language paper, Tonhauser (2007, henceforth T07) provides a comprehensive in-depth discussion of the semantics of two nominal temporal markers occurring in Paraguayan Guaraní, based on her fieldwork study and subsequent Ph.D. T explicitly situates her article as arguing against the claims of our Language article (Nordlinger & Sadler 2004, henceforth NS04), which presents a crosslinguistic study of the inflectional categories of tense, aspect, and mood on nominal categories, and classified Guaraní as having nominal tense markers. T argues that while the Guaraní nominal markers can be shown to ‘affect the temporal interpretation of the noun phrase they attach to’ (p. 831), they are not in fact markers of nominal tense.

Information

Type
Discussion
Information
Language , Volume 84 , Issue 2 , June 2008 , pp. 325 - 331
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

We would like to thank the editor, Brian Joseph, for inviting us to write this reply in the interests of stimulating interesting debate on the issue, and Andy Spencer and Nick Evans for helpful comments. We are also grateful to Judith Tonhauser for regularly sharing copies of her work during the course of her research into this topic.

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