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In English, simple present (plain) and present progressive constructions can make reference to the future, in constructions known as futurates. In previous literature, these two types of futurate have often been discussed separately or treated as more or less equivalent. This squib argues that they convey different meanings: plain futurates presuppose the existence of a schedule, while progressive futurates do not. We propose a formal definition of a schedule and present novel empirical data based on a questionnaire study. We show that plain futurates are restricted to contexts providing a schedule, but progressive futurates are not.

In this paper, we discuss two types of plural marking, C1C2 reduplication and a -Vg- affix, on verbs in ʔayʔaǰuθəm (Comox-Sliammon), a Central Salish language. We argue that C1C2 plural reduplicati...

This paper challenges the cross-linguistic validity of the tense–aspect category ‘perfect’ by investigating 15 languages from eight different families (Atayal, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, English, German, Gitksan, Japanese, Javanese, Korean, Mandarin, Niuean, Québec French, St’át’imcets, Swahili, and Tibetan). The methodology involves using the storyboard ‘Miss Smith’s Bad Day’ to test for the availability of experiential, resultative, recent-past, and continuous readings, as well as lifetime effects, result-state cancellability, narrative progression, and compatibility with definite time adverbials. Results show that the target forms in these languages can be classified into four groups: (a) past perfectives; (b) experientials; (c) resultatives; and (d) hybrids (which allow both experiential and resultative readings). It is argued that the main division is between past perfectives, which contain a ‘pronominal’ tense, on the one hand, and the other three groups on the other, which involve existential quantification, either over times (experiential) or over events (resultative). The methodological and typological implications of the findings are discussed. The main conclusion of the study is that there is no universal category of ‘the perfect’, and that instead, researchers should focus on identifying shared semantic components of tense–aspect categories across languages.

In this paper, we present novel data from ʔayʔaǰuθəm (a.k.a. Comox-Sliammon; an understudied Salish language) that challenge both the claim that all evidentials are epistemic modals (Matthewson 2012) and the claim that evidentials and modals are distinct, non-overlapping categories (e.g. Aikhenvald 2004, Speas 2010}. We take the defining difference between modal and nonmodal evidentials to be that modal evidentials contribute an at-issue claim involving quantification over possible worlds/situations, whereas nonmodal evidentials do not; both types of evidentials contribute information about the speaker's source of evidence for the proposition. We argue that ʔayʔaǰuθəm has two types of evidentials: one set are epistemic modals, while the other set are nonmodal deictic particles. Though we argue against the claims that evidentials are uniformly modal or nonmodal, we propose that both types of evidentials encode relations between situations (following Speas 2010).

This chapter discusses evidentiality and modality in the languages indigenous to North America. Evidentiality concerns the expression of source of information, while modality concerns the expression of possibility and necessity. The languages indigenous to North America have been of crucial importance to the development of semantic theories of these phenomena. We focus on the encoding of modal flavor and modal strength, how modal paradigms are organized, the overlap of modality and evidentiality, the kinds of meanings involved in evidential sentences, and how evidentials interact with different sentence types.

In this paper, we examine two markers of verbal plurality, C1C2 reduplication and ablaut, in ʔayʔajuɵəm , a Central Salish language. C1C2 reduplication marks event external pluractionality, where subevents are distributed in both space and time. It also applies in the nominal domain creating a plurality of individuals, but does not impose temporal or spatial distribution in the nominal domain. Following Henderson (2012, 2017), we propose that events are individuated through their temporal and spatial traces, so that events distribute in order to pluralize, whereas this is not required in the nominal domain. Ablaut marks event-internal pluractionality where subevents are grouped into a larger whole (Wood 2007; Henderson 2012, 2017). While ablaut pluractionals typically involve numerous subevents that are closely spaced in time, they can involve as few as two subevents and do not require strict adjacency of all subevents. We propose that they denote an atomic group event that is mapped to a plurality of events via a membership function (Barker 1992). This contrasts with event-internal pluractionals that require a high number of temporally adjacent subevents and have been analyzed as being grouped through their temporal configuration (Henderson 2012, 2017), indicating that there is more than one way to group events, just as there is more than one way to group individuals in the nominal domain (Barker 1992; Henderson 2012, 2017).