morphological mismatch and temporal reference

MORPHOLOGICAL MISMATCH AND TEMPORAL REFERENCE IN INTERACTION WITH LEXICAL SEMANTICS IN SPANISH

Introduction. Certain Spanish verbs show changes in meaning from their basic definitions in the Preterit Indicative. The examples below, taken from a typical Spanish language textbook (Dominicis and Reynolds 2007:11) and comparing the Imperfect Indicative with the Preterit Indicative, are representative of this class of verbs, for which I propose the term “aspectually polysemous stative verbs.” imperfect indicative conocía I knew, I was acquainted with costaba it cost (before purchasing) podía I was able to (I was in a position to) no podía I was not able to, could not quería I wanted to, desired to no quería I didn’t want to sabía I knew, knew how to, had knowledge that tenía I had (in my possession) tenía que I had to (but did not necessarily do it)

preterite indicative1 conocí I met, made the acquaintance of costó pude

it cost (after purchasing) I was able to (and did)

no pude quise no quise supe

I tried (but couldn’t) I tried to I refused to, would not I learned, found out

tuve I had, received tuve que I had to (and did do it)

In this article I show how tense, aspect, and mood interact with lexical semantics to produce these different meanings and how their distribution fits into cross-linguistic patterns of morphological mismatch. Although the data come primarily from Spanish, I employ diachronic and comparative data from other Romance languages and from Slavic languages. My I am grateful to participants at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, to Sharla Nichols, and to Wiliam F. Weigel (who also assisted me with the Slavic data), for their comments on earlier versions of this article. 1. In contrast with common practice, I include the mood of both the Imperfect Indicative and the Preterit, even though Spanish has no Preterit Subjunctive.

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goal is to produce a technical analysis compatible with resolving pedagogical difficulties, since, as Pulgram remarks, “there is no separate field of applied linguistics, but only linguistics applied” (1974:382). The meanings at issue. Before analyzing the relationship between the Imperfect Indicative and Preterit Indicative meanings of these verbs, we must first define them clearly. This requires careful separation of translation equivalents from the meanings themselves since, as I have argued in relation to grammaticalization (Juge 2007), translation equivalents sometimes impede the analysis of data. The verbs conocer, saber, poder, and querer are given below, with modified glosses as a first step in the process of establishing semantic relationships between the Imperfect and Preterit meanings. We can reduce the ever-present risk of misrepresentation inherent in relying on translations with carefully chosen glosses based on cross-linguistic analysis of polysemy patterns and a certain measure of generalized caution. Infinitive conocer

Imperfect Indicative know (be familiar with)

saber poder querer no querer

know (possess knowledge) have the capacity to desire to not desire to

Preterit Indicative meet (become familiar with, make the acquaintance of) find out, learn, realize attempt successfully to attempt to refuse to

The relationship between Imperfect Indicative and Preterit Indicative. Analyzing the relationships between Imperfect Indicative and Preterit Indicative meanings of a particular group of verbs also requires examination of the general relationship between these categories. I follow Cruse (1986) in referring to a particular semantic value of a given lexeme as a “sense.” The contexts in which the different senses of these verbs occur are typically identified only as Imperfect Indicative versus Preterit Indicative. Here I examine further the relationship between these two parts of the verbal system, with some supplementary discussion of aspect in Slavic. It is well known that aspect, the broad category that includes, among other values, imperfective and perfective, is a complicated phenomenon that is expressed in myriad ways. Because of the importance (and difficulty) of distinguishing language-specific patterns, I follow Comrie’s practice (1976:12–13) of using lower case to discuss cross-linguistically recognized categories and upper case to discuss forms and categories in a given language (for example, Comrie explains that the Ancient Greek Aorist “is in the Indicative Mood primarily a past tense” [1976:12]). I also follow Comrie (1989) in acknowledging the difficulties in establishing cross-linguistically valid terminology and adopting provisional terms until the discovery of further distinctions and relationships necessitate modifications. Tense-aspect interactions in Spanish. The Spanish verbal system divides tense into past and non-past (which encompasses Present and, in the

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Indicative, Future). The system also distinguishes three moods: Indicative, Subjunctive, and Imperative. The Conditional (both simple and Perfect), which also expresses relative-temporal value, is sometimes considered a mood. The past component of the Indicative expresses the imperfective/ perfective distinction morphologically via the Imperfect Indicative and Preterit Indicative, illustrated in examples (1) and (2). Since paradigms traditionally referred to as “tenses” also encode mood and aspect, I follow Aronson (1982:41) in borrowing the term “screeve” from Georgian linguistics. (1) imperfect indicative (2) preterite indicative

Leía un artículo fascinante. ‘I was reading a fascinating article’. Leí un artículo fascinante. ‘I read a fascinating article’.

Sentence (1) presents the act of reading without reference to its beginning or end, perhaps answering the question ¿Qué hacías cuando te llamé anoche? (‘What were you doing when I called you last night?’). Sentence (2) presents the act of reading as complete. It might answer the question ¿Hiciste algo interesante anoche? (‘Did you do anything interesting last night?’). That is, it is not that these verb forms “mean” different things, but rather that they emphasize different phases of a single activity. Despite general agreement on the basic nature of this opposition, consensus on how this distinction maps onto the semantics of aspectually polysemous stative verbs has proved elusive. Bolinger (1963) discusses the long history of the issue, stretching back at least to Bello’s (1847) treatment. Bolinger focuses on refining a particular point made in Bull (1960), namely, the notion that Preterit Indicative forms of aspectually polysemous stative verbs encode inceptiveness, i.e., the beginning of a state. Bolinger’s principal contribution centers on distinguishing between references—senses inherent in a word or form— from inferences— contextually sensitive senses. Hwu (2005) elaborates on Bolinger’s approach by tying it to Grice’s (1975) Cooperative Principle, which outlines how speakers work together in conversation. Hwu argues that the Preterit Indicative allows the speaker “to carve out the span of a past situation,” thus making the endpoint “available for pragmatic interpretations. The meaning is arrived at by inference” (2005:204). Hwu’s emphasis on inference accords with the variability in the interpretation of aspectually polysemous stative verbs, but it does not account for the high degree of conventionality found in most cases. Rodríguez addresses the Spanish data in terms of “the so-called aspectual shift frequently encountered in the interpretation of stative verbs in the simple preterit” (2007:227). To resolve the conundrum posed by “a combination of stative verb with perfective aspect [that] seems to imply a non-stative or dynamic interpretation” (2007:227), Rodríguez argues that

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“cognitive stative verbs” like conocer and saber encode “macro-events,” or sequences of an inchoative process and a resultant state. He rejects attempts by de Swart (1998) and Michaelis (2004) to explain the data as instances of coercion, a kind of type-shifting illustrated by the use of a beer to refer to a bottle of beer, where the mass noun beer is coerced into a count noun interpretation. Though Rodríguez accepts de Swart’s and Michaelis’s assumption “that the Romance past tenses [i.e., the simple preterit and the imperfect of Spanish] are aspectually sensitive,” he argues that the Imperfect Indicative and the Preterit Indicative “will function only as aspectual filters on the range of interpretation of these verbs” (2007:239). Much like Bolinger, Rodríguez sees the Preterit Indicative as encoding an event that constitutes the beginning of a state, which is treated as the basic meaning of the lexeme and is expressed by the Imperfect Indicative. Thus sentence (3) encodes the event of Marta’s making Luis’s acquaintance (in 2000), which is the beginning of a state, namely, her knowing him (4). (3) event

preterit indicative

(4) state

imperfect indicative

Marta conoció a Luis ‘Marta met Luis’ [in 2000] Marta conocía a Luis ‘Marta knew Luis’ [e.g., in 2005]

Although this analysis seems plausible for conocer and saber, not all aspectually polysemous stative verbs show this sequencing. Poder, for instance, in the Preterit Indicative encodes a sense similar to English manage: Por fin pude entender su idea (‘I finally managed to understand her idea’). In affirmative sentences, this verb resembles other aspectually polysemous stative verbs since the speaker enters a lasting state. First she is (perhaps suddenly) able to understand the idea and, presumably, continues to do so for some time. With negative sentences, however, this schema does not fit, as shown in examples (5) and (6), neither of which is inchoative. In (5), the “event” corresponds to the point at which the subject quit searching for the guitar. In (6), the speaker indicates that he tried to lift the trophy but was not strong enough. The lack of strength was made evident at the moment when he made the attempt to lift the trophy, and there is no indication that his inability to lift the trophy later changed. (5) No pudo encontrar la guitarra. ‘He couldn’t find the guitar’. (6) No pude levantar el trofeo. ‘I couldn’t lift the trophy’.

Similarly, negative sentences with querer (as in 7) express rejection, but the state of not wanting the rejected thing is likely to exist both before and after the person’s preference is made explicit. In this regard the Imperfect Indicative presents a potential state and the Preterit Indicative

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presents a moment at which that potential state is turned into an action, which helps to explain Dominicis and Reynolds’s (2007) inclusion of costar ‘cost’ with the aspectually polysemous stative verbs: potential price and actual price correspond to the Imperfect Indicative and Preterit Indicative, respectively. (7) Marta no quiso ver la película. ‘Marta refused to see the movie’.

With some verbs, however, the order of event and state may be the opposite of what Rodríguez proposes. For instance, as examples (8) and (9) illustrate, querer can express a desire (a state) and the subsequent event of attempting to turn the desire into reality. After one tries to do something, the desire may disappear for various reasons: Marta only wanted to play once, she didn’t like playing, and so on. Rodríguez’s proposed inchoative event-state schema does not fit such cases. (8) state

imperfect indicative

(9) event

preterit indicative

Marta quería tocar la canción. ‘Marta wanted to play the song’. Marta quiso tocar la canción. ‘Marta tried to play the song’.

The relationships among the phases (e.g., desire and action) of the situations encoded by these verbs suggests that their different meanings are better understood as the result of the interaction between their basic semantics, the aspectual values of the Imperfect Indicative and the Preterit Indicative, and pragmatic factors such as those identified by Hwu (2005). Lexicalization patterns and polysemy. The variability in polysemy and lexicalization patterns found in verbs like conocer and saber hinges on what Bybee calls relevance: “A meaning element is relevant to another meaning element if the semantic content of the first directly affects or modifies the semantic content of the second” (1985:13, emphasis in the original). In verbal morphology, she identifies aspect as a highly relevant feature, a claim strongly supported by research on suppletion, “the phenomenon whereby regular semantic and/or grammatical relations are encoded by unpredictable formal patterns” (Veselinova 2006:xv). Veselinova discusses the relationship among tense, aspect, and suppletion at considerable length (2006, chapters 4 and 5). On the connection between aspect and relevance, Bybee claims that the categories most likely to be inflectional, as aspect is in Romance, “appear in the center of the scale, where relevance is sufficient, but not so high that [they] tend toward lexicalization” (1985:19). The precise position of aspect on the continuum of relevance escapes exact determination. Aspect can be expressed lexically (English know ~ meet), derivationally (Russian Imperfective pisát’ ‘write’ ~ Perfective na-pisát’ ‘to write’), or inflectionally (Spanish Imperfect Indicative comía ‘she was eating’ ~ Preterit Indicative comió ‘she ate’). Such continua, with intermediate zones and variable outcomes, also characterize other areas

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of morphology, for example, in optional overlapping suppletion. I define overlapping suppletion as the “situation in which forms of one lexeme . . . also belong to a suppletive relationship with forms of another lexeme” (Juge 2000:186). In Spanish, for instance, fui is a suppletive Preterit Indicative form of both ir ‘go’ and ser ‘be’. Some languages exhibit optional overlapping, in which one of the lexemes that share a suppletive paradigm also has regular variants for those forms. Portuguese morto, for example, is the weakly suppletive Past Participle of morrer ‘die’ and of matar ‘kill’, which also has a non-suppletive variant of the participle, matado. Like the variety of ways in which aspect is encoded cross-linguistically, optional overlapping suppletion illustrates the variable expression of phenomena in intermediate positions along continua. Spanish shows such variability in aspect marking in that some of the specific senses of these aspectually polysemous stative verbs also have distinct lexical synonyms. For example, enterarse ‘find out’ shares the dynamic sense of saber normally associated with the Preterit Indicative, but not the stative sense normally associated with the Imperfect Indicative of saber. Likewise, intentar ‘try’ has the dynamic sense of poder, but not its stative sense, and desear ‘desire’ has the stative sense of querer but not its dynamic sense. Aspectual distinctions. Determining the factors affecting the distribution of the senses of aspectually polysemous stative verbs depends on clearly identifying the aspectual distinctions made in Spanish. Comrie observes that, in some languages, certain aspectual distinctions are restricted to a given tense, with the past being “the tense that most often evinces aspectual distinctions” (1976:71). As indicated above, this is true in Spanish, which marks the imperfective/perfective distinction explicitly only in the Past Indicative, which comprises the Imperfect Indicative and the Preterit Indicative. Elsewhere the Spanish verb system neutralizes this distinction. In the Present, Future, Conditional, Present Perfect, Future Perfect, and Conditional Perfect, Spanish does not explicitly encode perfectivity, although some languages do encode perfectivity in these categories (e.g., Greek Future Imperfective qa gravfw ‘I will write [habitually]’ vs. Future Perfective qa gravyw ‘I will write [on a specific occasion]’). Consequently, in aspectually polysemous stative verbs, these screeves may express either their stative or dynamic senses, as in examples (10) (dynamic) and (11) (stative), both in the Present Perfect Indicative: (10) He conocido a muchas personas aquí. ‘I’ve met many people here’. (11) Lo he conocido toda mi vida. ‘I’ve known him my whole life’.

Complex aspectual interactions. In Spanish, bounded states (in which the beginning or the ending, or both, is highlighted) and repeated

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events may call for a Past form not normally associated with that aspectual value. For instance, whereas an event is typically expressed in the Preterit Indicative, habits consisting of repeated events are typically expressed in the Imperfect Indicative, as in examples (12 ) and (13): (12) De niña iba al campo cada verano. ‘As a girl I went to the country every summer’. (13) De estudiante, conocía a mucha gente cada semestre. ‘As a student, I met a lot of people every semester’.

Just as example (12) presents the event of a trip to the country as a repeated occurrence, example (13) presents multiple events of meeting people, each of which on its own would be expressed in the Preterit Indicative (conocí ‘I met’). On the other hand, a bounded state is expressed with the Preterit Indicative (14): (14) Lo conoció por muchos años. ‘She knew him for many years’.

These examples, using conocer, illustrate that, for aspectually polysemous stative verbs, associating one sense exclusively with the Imperfect Indicative and another with the Preterit Indicative misrepresents the data. Although such simplifications may be suitable for beginners’ textbooks, the omission of such considerations from the technical literature is surprising. Furthermore, since the aspectual distinction encoded by the Imperfect Indicative and Preterit Indicative is neutralized in other screeves, the link between particular senses and given screeves (e.g., stative and Imperfect Indicative) proves even weaker. Mood, aspect, and clause types. Although Comrie recognizes interactions between aspect and tense in his 1976 and 1985 works, he does not discuss possible interactions between aspect and mood in either. We saw earlier that the use of a particular screeve depends in part on aspectual distinctions that relate to whether a predicate is bounded. Syntactic considerations also affect which screeve is used, sometimes overriding semantic factors. Here I examine some interactions between mood and aspect that are found in subordinate clauses but not in main clauses. Temporal clauses. This discussion contrasts expected future events and general temporal relationships in when-clauses. The following examples illustrate four types of screeve that are used with expected future events: I. Future Indicative Latin Cum veniet French Quand il viendra Italian Quando verrà Russian Kogdá prid’ót

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Present Indicative

IV. Non-Present Non-Indicative Portuguese Quando vier

Future Subjunctive

Spanish typically expresses a general temporal relationship via the Present Indicative in both the independent and subordinate clauses. Since the Present may express either a general statement (15) or a future event (16), some sentences differ only in the use of the Present Indicative or the Present Subjunctive, marking imperfective and perfective, respectively. The morphological contrast expresses the difference between a general pattern, for example, the receipt of a regular salary check, as in (15), and an expected future event, for example, the receipt of a bonus, as in (16). In such sentences, the opposition between Present Indicative and Present Subjunctive corresponds to the aspectual distinction between imperfective and perfective that is encoded morphologically in the Imperfect and the Preterit Indicative. (15) Cuando me pagan, compro un CD. ‘When they pay me [every month], I buy a CD’. (16) Cuando me paguen, compro esa guitarra. ‘When they pay me [a bonus], I’ll buy that guitar’.

With aspectually polysemous stative verbs like conocer and saber, the senses of the Present Indicative (17) and Present Subjunctive (18) in these clause types match those typically found in the Imperfect Indicative and the Preterit Indicative, respectively. Since the contrast between the stative and dynamic senses of these verbs can be expressed not only by the Imperfect Indicative/Preterit Indicative opposition but also by the Present Indicative/Present Subjunctive opposition, the connection between the Imperfect Indicative and the stative sense of aspectually polysemous stative verbs and the Preterit Indicative and the dynamic sense of these verbs appears to weaken further. (17) Cuando conoces a alguien, sonríes. ‘When you meet someone, [in general] you smile’. (18) Cuando conozcas a Mario, dale este libro. ‘When you meet Mario, give him this book’.

Whereas Spanish uses morphological mood to mark this aspectual distinction, Italian makes the same distinction via morphological tense, contrasting Present Indicative general patterns (19) and Future Indicative for expected future events (20). (19) Quando conosci qualcuno, sorridi. ‘When you meet someone (in general), you smile’.

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(20) Quando conoscerai Mario, dagli questo libro. ‘When you meet Mario, give him this book’.

Lyons attributes the fact that “reference to future world-states is grammaticalized in the category of mood, rather than tense, in many languages” to the “linguistically important fact that . . . we are seldom in a position to lay claim to knowledge of the future” (1977:815). Indeed, the Latin Future Indicative is, historically, a mix of periphrastic forms and old subjunctive forms (Palmer 1954:271), which supports the view that irrealis mood is related to both future tense and subjunctive mood (cf. Palmer 2001). The broader significance of the Spanish examples of interaction between aspect and mood becomes clearer when we compare them with some data from the Slavic languages. In some Slavic languages, including Russian, the Perfective Future comprises Present-tense inflections on the Perfective stem: Russian pi∫-ú ‘I write’ ~ napi∫-ú ‘I will write (once)’. For the purposes of this argument, if we treat the Present Indicative Imperfective as the most basic paradigm (setting aside for now the inherent difficulties in the notion of basic or unmarked paradigms), then a certain parallelism emerges between the Russian and Spanish ways of expressing the future perfective in when-clauses. Both languages express the future perfective by combining one element of the “basic” paradigm (Present endings in Russian, Present tense in Spanish) with a “non-basic” element (Perfective stem in Russian, Subjunctive mood in Spanish). These seemingly disparate examples reveal a similarity between ways of expressing this combination of tense and aspect features in that both languages express future perfective with forms that employ a kind of deviation from the unmarked value of either aspect or mood. Neither language has morphology directly dedicated to expressing the future perfective. Instead, each combines facets of the morphological system to encode this tense/aspect combination. The data fit into a broader pattern in which languages make comparable distinctions via significantly different means. For example, whereas some languages (e.g., Russian) use imperfective and perfective verb forms to encode the difference between reading part of a book and reading an entire book—respectively, (21) and (22)—, others express the same distinction through case marking, as Finnish does with the partitive and accusative—respectively, (23) and (24) (cf. Karlsson 1999:85): (21) Ánna t∫itála knígu. ‘Anna was reading a/the book’. (22) Ánna prot∫itála knígu. ‘Anna read a/the book’. (23) Satu luki kirjaa. ‘Satu was reading a/the book’. (24) Satu luki kirjan. ‘Satu read a/the book’.

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Although it is possible to identify non-random connections among the forms found in different languages, there appears at this time to be little basis for explaining or predicting which patterns a given language will exhibit. In this regard, this phenomenon is much like other areas of language change. Future time reference in the protasis of conditional sentences. Comrie (1982) addresses the expression of future time reference in the protases (if-clauses) of conditional sentences, where we find a typology similar to that presented above for when-clauses. I first consider if-clauses and then show that unless-clauses reveal important morphosyntactic differences. As Comrie (1982) points out, conditionals and temporal clauses do not necessarily use the same morphological marking to present an upcoming event. Comrie typologizes conditionals as follows: Type I matches the temporal reference of the clause with Future tense and features Indicative morphology. Types II and III both exhibit a mismatch in temporal reference (future) and verb tense (Present) but differ with respect to the use the unmarked mood (Indicative, Type II) or a marked mood (Subjunctive, Type III). Type IV shows no mismatch between the temporal reference and the verb tense,2 but does use a marked mood (e.g., Subjunctive in Portuguese). As a Type II language, Spanish shows a mismatch between the future reference and Present morphology, in contrast with the use of the Present Subjunctive in when-clauses. I. Future Indicative Latin Si veniet Italian Si verrà Russian Jesli prid’ót II. Present Indicative Spanish Si viene French S’il vient English If he comes III. Present Non-Indicative Armenian Et’e ga

Present Subjunctive3

IV. Future Subjunctive Portuguese Se vier

Clauses containing conjunctions equivalent to English unless reveal additional complications. Dancygier (2002) observes that these clauses are widely thought of as being equivalent to negative conditionals. She shows, however, that if . . . not-clauses and unless-clauses are not equivalent. Her evidence for non-equivalence in English comes primarily from 2. I set aside here the issue of the temporal reference of the Portuguese Future Subjunctive. For discussion, see Comrie and Holmback 1984. 3. Dum-Tragut calls this the Future Subjunctive (2009:611) but Comrie calls it Present Subjunctive (1982:145).

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semantics. In Romance, the distinctions between clauses with if . . . not and those with unless also involve morphosyntax. Spanish and Portuguese illustrate the morphological variability in such structures (25) and (26). Clauses with future temporal reference introduced by a no ser que / a não ser que (‘unless’) require the Present Subjunctive, whereas clauses with future temporal reference introduced by si . . . no / se . . . não (‘if . . . not’) require either the Present Indicative (Spanish) or the Future Subjunctive (Portuguese). These examples highlight the lack of a direct correlation between the temporal reference of a predicate and the morphological marking on the verb. (25) A no ser que venga

Present Subjunctive Si no viene

Present Subjunctive (26) A não ser que venha Present Subjunctive Se não vier Future Subjunctive ‘Unless he comes’ ‘If he doesn’t come’

These examples reveal that, for Spanish aspectually polysemous stative verbs, the senses typically expressed by the Imperfect Indicative are expressed by the Present Indicative in certain clause types. Those typically expressed by the Preterit Indicative are also expressed by the Present Subjunctive in certain clause types, especially when-clauses and unless-clauses expressing an upcoming event. The fact that Portuguese matches Spanish in using the Present Subjunctive in unless-clauses highlights the influence that syntactic and semantic properties of clause types may have on screeve selection. The cross-linguistic data suggest that aspect displays an intermediate level of semantic relevance, that is, its level of relevance is low enough to be expressed inflectionally in some languages but high enough to be expressed lexically in others. Furthermore, partial correlations between mismatches in verbal and nominal systems highlight the importance of analyzing morphology and discourse jointly. Diachronic perspective. Patterns of screeve usage with future temporal reference are naturally subject to diachronic change. Whereas Italian matches Latin in using the Future Indicative4 in both temporal and conditional clauses, French does so only in temporal clauses. In conditionals, French shares the use of the Present Indicative with Spanish. In when-clauses, however, Spanish uses the Present Subjunctive. Portuguese uses the Future Subjunctive in both when- and if-clauses. These divergent developments reinforce the well-known fact that languages may differ along many axes. Our task as historical linguists is not only to determine what changes have occurred, but also how those changes fit into typologies of change and what kind of linguistic structures result from them. 4. Recall that the Italian Future Indicative does not derive formally from the Latin Future Indicative.

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With specific reference to lexicalization as it relates to tense, aspect, and mood, I have argued here that even a brief sampling of these patterns confirms not only that tense, aspect, and mood categories do not always neatly correspond to morphological categories, but also that the boundaries of these mismatches vary cross-linguistically in ways that, paradoxically, are neither random nor predictable. Conclusions. Apparent meaning changes in the Imperfect Indicative and the Preterit Indicative of stative verbs in Spanish open a window onto the complex ways in which the world’s languages exhibit mismatches of form and meaning, including mismatches between temporal value and morphological tense. Attempts to account for the specific patterns of Spanish have overlooked the role of mood in the expression of tense and aspect in subordinate clauses, and as a result, fail to place the Spanish data into cross-linguistic and diachronic context. Since aspect has an intermediate position on the continuum of relevance, its cross-linguistic expression exhibits a high degree of variability, which combines with variation in lexical semantics to produce a broad array of ways of encoding tense, aspect, and mood. Matthew L. Juge Texas State University—San Marcos

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