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Article published In:
Development of tense and aspect systems
Edited by Jadranka Gvozdanović
[Journal of Historical Linguistics 10:2] 2020
► pp. 167–208

The history of tense and aspect in the Sogeram family

| University of Oregon
This paper presents an overview of the tens-aspect system in the Sogeram languages of Papua New Guinea. Taking the Proto-Sogeram reconstruction in Daniels (2015, 2020) as a starting point, I outline the innovations that have taken place in daughter languages and discuss the patterns of change that emerge. The study confirms a variety of known cross-linguistic tendencies, such as the common occurrence of the analytic-to-synthetic and aspect-to-tense pathways of change. More notable trends include the diachronic stability of the present and most remote past tenses; the instability of the middle pasts and future; the stability of the relative semantic ordering of tenses; the absence of a pathway leading from relative-tense to absolute-tense marking; and the ability of innovative tenses to be inserted anywhere into the five-way tense system of Proto-Sogeram. The study also illustrates how featural systems can interact over time, at first by introducing a new feature value in one system which can combine with values from another (as with the Manat habitual), and then, if the featural distinction is lost, creating a pattern of distributed exponence (as in Mum).
Keywords: tense, aspect, comparative reconstruction, grammaticalization, Papuan languages, Trans New Guinea languages
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Proto-Sogeram tense-aspect system
    • 2.1Synthetic forms
    • 2.2Serial verb constructions
  • 3.Innovations
    • 3.1Gants innovations
    • 3.2Kursav innovations
    • 3.3Aisi innovations
    • 3.4Mum innovations
    • 3.5Sirva innovations
    • 3.6Apalɨ innovations
    • 3.7Manat innovations
    • 3.8Nend innovations
    • 3.9Mand innovations
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Generalizations about source constructions
    • 4.2Generalizations about target constructions
    • 4.3What we do not see
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 21 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.18012.dan
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