The Karitiana’s temporal and aspectual system

Abstract

We present an overview on tense and aspect in Karitiana (Tupi). Even with a few works on this topic (STORTO, 2002; 2013; CARVALHO, 2009; ROCHA, 2018), this temporal and aspectual system is not well understood and some questions remain open. Karitiana has verbal suffixes that distinguish future from non-future and aspectual auxiliaries which mark singular imperfectivity, perfect and prospective. The purpose of this article is to extend the semantic description on the aspectual and temporal systems in Karitiana answering three questions that were not discussed in the previous works on this language: (i) if non-future is ambiguous or non-specific; (ii) the status of the future suffix (tense, aspect or mood); (iii) explain the restriction of imperfective tykat which cannot occur with a past reading. This description is relevant since it helps to enlarge our understanding on how tense and aspect categories work crosslinguistically. It uses the formal semantics apparatus assuming that tense expresses the relation between utterance time and topic time and aspect expresses the relation between topic time and situation time (REICHENBACH, 1947; KLEIN, 1994). Our corpus has sentences collected by the authors with native speakers using contextualized data elicitation (MATTHEWSON, 2004; SANCHEZ-MENDES, 2014). In our analysis, we argue that non-future in Karitiana is ambiguous, meaning it can be either present or past but not both at the same time. We assume that future is a tense, differently from what is generally assumed in the literature (ABUSCH, 1998). For tykat’s restriction with the past, we argue that it is lexically encoded on this aspect’s semantics that the topic time that it gets must be equal or posterior to the speech time.