41: This time it gets tense - The grammar of time (Patreon)

Published:

2020-02-20 23:39:23

Imported:

2023-02

Content

How do languages talk about the time when something happens? Of course, we can use words like “yesterday”, “on Tuesday”, “once upon a time”, “now”, or “in a few minutes”. But some languages also require their speakers to use an additional small piece of language to convey time-related information, and this is called tense.

In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne talk about when some languages obligatorily encode time into their grammar. We look at how linguists go about determining whether a language has tense at all, and if so, how many tenses it has, from two tenses (like English past and non-past), to three tenses (past, present, and future), to further tenses, like remote past and on-the-same-day.

For the links mentioned in this episode, check out the shownotes page at lingthusiasm.com/post/19093707928…me-it-gets-tense

Files

41: This time it gets tense - The grammar of time by Lingthusiasm

How do languages talk about the time when something happens? Of course, we can use words like "yesterday", "on Tuesday", "once upon a time", "now", or "in a few minutes". But some languages also require their speakers to use an additional small piece of language to convey time-related information, and this is called tense.