language with no remoteness distinction in the past. .... in (16b) is used to indicate that the action happened yesterday. In (16c), the perfective .... is not acceptable, even though the temporal adverb âyesterdayâ indicates the past. Thus, the.
Past tense usages in tense-rich and tenseless languages: a contrastive study
Masahiko Nose, Shiga University, Japan
Masahiko Nose is an associate professor at the Faculty of Economics, Shiga University, Japan. He obtained his Ph.D. in functional linguistics from Tohoku University, Japan in 2003. His major research interests include the languages in Papua New Guinea and linguistic typology.
1. Introduction This study seeks to contrast languages with rich tense systems and those without tenses (tenseless). As frequently observed in European languages, the past tense is one of the most basic tense markings, and most languages have at least one present and past tense each (Binnick 2012, Velupillai 2016). It focuses on the past tense functions in the following four sample languages—Amele, Ma Manda, Nguna from the South Pacific, and Mandarin Chinese. Amele and Ma Manda have rich tense systems with remoteness distinctions (Foley 2000), whereas Nguna and Chinese are well-known for their tenselessness (Lin 2012). Tense, particularly the past tense, is one of the necessary grammatical categories. The past tense is normally more marked than the unmarked present tense—study–studied, run–ran, go– went—in English. Temporal references (such as present, past, and future) are necessary in grammar, and all languages have grammatical or lexical means of specifying such temporal references. However, there are languages that are tenseless, and this study makes an effort to clarify the effect of tenselessness by contrasting tenseless languages with tense-rich languages. Moreover, this study considers how to interpret temporal adverbs vis-à-vis the past tense. Almost all languages have temporal adverbs, such as today, yesterday, and tomorrow. Such temporal adverbs are crucial when making temporal references. However, many languages 1
tend to grammaticalize tense and aspect markers1 Thus, this study examines these four languages and their past tense features (their forms and meanings), and discusses the functional basis of the features in the grammars. In particular, this study tries to clarify the functional effects of a rich tense and tenseless system, and ultimately argues that the effects are related to the participants of the event. The tense meaning in languages with rich tense systems is deeply linked to person and number, while tenseless languages are only interested in actions in the past (cf. Smith 1997, 2005, Sinha et al. 2011). Section 2 provides an introduction to previous general studies on tense and language descriptions in Papua New Guinea, and then sets out the aims of this contrastive study. Section 3 provides the data on the past tense or related phenomena in the sample languages. Section 4 contains a discussion of rich tense and tenseless features, and section 5 concludes the study.
2. General remarks on the past tense In this section, we review several previous studies on the past tense and introduce basic assumptions about rich tense and tenseless languages. First, Dahl and Velupillai (2005) conducted a typological survey of past tenses. Figure 1 shows that the most frequent type is languages with the present tense and no remoteness distinctions (gray triangles), as observed in most European languages, and that the next most frequent type is tenseless languages (white circles). These tenseless languages are observed in Central Africa, South East Asia, and North and Central Africa.2
[Figure 1, here]
In contrast, there are 40 languages that use remoteness distinctions as part of the past tenses (black circles). For example, Amele (Trans-New Guinea, Papua New Guinea) has three remoteness distinctions as shown in (1). These rich-tense languages are observed in New 2
Guinea Island and South America. This study specifically examines data from the New Guinea area.
(1) Amele (Roberts 1987): Present: Ija
fri-diga.
I
surprise-1sg (1st person singular)/present
“I am surprised.” Today’s past: Ija
fri-iti-ga.
I
surprise-1sg/today’s past
“I was surprised (today)” Yesterday’s past: Ija
fri-iti-gan.
I
surprise-1sg/yesterday’s past
“I was surprised (yesterday)” Remote past: Ija
fri-it-en.
I
surprise-1sg/remote past
“I was surprised (before yesterday)”
Such remoteness distinctions in the past tense in (1) are not observed in English and other European languages. Amele (and other rich-tense languages) has reasons for such distinctions. On the other hand, there are 88 languages that are tenseless. And, these languages have also their own reasons for being so. This study aims to find the effects of rich tense or tenselessness in the grammar and demonstrate that there are reasons for this grammatical behavior. We also review the use of the past tense in other languages. First, Japanese has a simple 3
past tense system (one past tense only), as shown in the following (2).
(2) Japanese: yomu (to read) – present: yo-mu (I read) 1st person singular (1sg): yon-da
1st person plural (1pl): yon-da
2sg: yon-da
2pl: yon-da
3sg: yon-da
3pl: yon-da
Japanese does not have a formal perfective and, moreover, it does not have a tense inflection for person and number. This system is almost simple as tenseless languages. Second, French involves more complicated past tense usage, as shown in (3).
(3) French: aimer (to love) – present: j’aime (I love) a. passé composé (avoir/être+ past participle): j’ai aimé. b. imparfait: j’aimais. c. habitual past: quand j’étais petit, j’allais souvent a la piscine (when I was little, I often went to the pool). d. plus-que-parfait (avoir/être (imparfait)+ past participle): j’avais aimé. e. passé simple (written use): j’aimai. f. passé anterieur (avoir/être (imparfait)+ past participle): j’eus aimé.
French has a mixed system of past and perfect, as shown in (3), and still arguable to describe their past usages semantically. However, Dahl and Velupillai (2005) classified French as a language with no remoteness distinction in the past. Other typological and descriptive studies, such as Aikhenvald (2014), Bybee and Dahl (1989), Comrie (1976, 1985), and Smith (1997) have already demonstrated that there are a variety of tense-aspect systems around the world, and that some languages are tense-dependent while others are aspect-dependent. Otherwise, modal meanings are more or less related in tense-aspect systems. Dahl and Velupillai (2005) show that only 40 languages 4
have past tenses with 2 or more remoteness distinctions, but that 88 languages have no tense at all. This means that languages do not in fact necessarily need a tense system (particularly the past tense); indeed, it is more unusual to have a high number of remoteness distinctions. This study supposes that there is certain reason or effect of rich tense or tenselessness to explain their usages (cf. Lin 2012, Velupillai 2016).
3. Data: a contrastive study This section sets out the examples of the sample languages. This study is a contrastive study, and it will clarify the past tense usages by checking remoteness distinctions, verbal morphology, and perfective implications. The contrastive study methodology used by Aikhenvald (2014), König and Gast (2009) and Nose (2016) will be followed. This study consists of field-based data and descriptive grammars.
Data sources: 1.
Amele: Roberts (1989, 2016), author’s own data (Nose 2016)
2.
Ma Manda: Pennington (2015)3
3.
Nguna: Schütz (1969), author’s own data (Nose 2007)
4.
Chinese: Koshimizu and Shimada (2009), Po-Ching and Rimmingston (2004), Setoguchi (2003), Yamashita (2003), author’s own data
Generally, Trans-New Guinea languages like Amele and Ma Manada are considered to have more complicated tense/aspect systems than the other Austronesian languages Nguna and Sino-Tibetan Chinese (Roberts 1987, Lin 2012). The choice of the sample languages is not wide enough to provide a complete typology, but this contrastive study aims to look at the grammatical possibilities and functional effects of the languages by examining unusual tense features, specifically those that are found in English and European languages. Nevertheless, this study aims to identify the best type of tense system by contrasting these four languages.4 The data were collected through the descriptive grammars and the interviews mentioned 5
above. Primarily, this study found that Amele (Trans-New Guinea, Papua New Guinea) has three kinds of past tenses as shown in (1) and (4). Moreover, Amele has the habitual past and negative past forms as shown in (5). As shown in Table 1, the tense forms are included in verbal inflections. Verbal inflections in Amele are quite complicated and the word formations of person, number, and tense morphemes are portmanteau forms, and cannot be clearly divided. The past form implies a perfective meaning as shown in (6). The verb form is today’s past tense and the adverb “wele” (already) was added as shown in (6). In other words, Amele needs lexical means (i.e. the adverb “already”) to imply the perfective meaning.
(4) Amele (Roberts 1987): three kinds of basic past tenses Today’s past: Ija (I) hu-g-a. “I came (today).” Yesterday’s past: Ija hu-g-an. “I came (yesterday).” Remote past: Ija ho-om. “I came (before yesterday).”
(5) Amele: other additional past tenses Habitual past: Ija ho-l-ig. “I used to come.” Negative past: Ija qee (not) ho-l-om. “I did not come.”
[Table 1. here]
(6) Uqa
wele
He/she
nui-a. already
go-3sg/today’s past
“He has already gone.” (Roberts 1987: 232)
The observation mentioned from (4), (5), and (6) (and also (1)) and Table 1 together indicates that Amele is tense-rich language, but it is poor in aspect usage (Roberts 1989: 224). Many aspect meanings are realized in other tenses, such as the habitual tense or today’s past tense (Roberts states that the perfective aspect is inherent in the today’s past tense) or via lexical 6
means, such as the adverb used for the perfective as shown in (6). Next, Ma Manda (Trans-New Guinea, Papua New Guinea) has two remoteness distinctions between the near past (the form -a-) and the remote past (-ga-) as shown in (7). Ma Manda uses tense suffixes through verbal inflections as shown in Table 2 and Table 3. Thus, the verbal paradigms in Ma Manda are a combination of tense and subject agreement.
(7) Ma Manda (Pennington 2015: 366–369): Near past: taamengsûla
membû
tem
laal-a-k.
morning
head
hair scrape-near past-3sg
“(This) morning he shaved his head.” Remote past: kep
bûsenang aatûkugu
yesterday jungle
ba-go-t.
be-go-durative come-remote past-1sg
“Yesterday going around in the bush, I came (back).”
[Table 2. here]
[Table 3. here]
The negative past in Ma Manda can be expressed using the negator “dom” (not), but the verbal form is the remote past, not a negative past form as shown in (8) (Pennington 2015: 365). Pennington (2015) explains that the near past is seldom negated. If negated, it seems to carry the implication that the action is still expected to occur. Moreover, there is no perfective aspect marker in Ma Manda (Pennington 2015: 379), but perfective meaning can be expressed with the help of the adverb “mo” (already) as shown in (9).
(8)
nolû
wa
dom (not) nûng-go(remote past)-k (3sg). 7
Brother
that
not
tell-remote past-3sg
“He did not tell his brother.”
(9)
mi
mo (already)
wi-nga (near past)-t (1sg).
Water
already
bathe-near past-1sg
“I’ve already bathed (today).” (Pennington 2015: 399)
Next, this study gives the examples of tenseless languages. First, Nguna (Austronesian, Vanuatu) has a simple verbal structure and no independent tense and aspect markers as shown in (10a). When Nguna prefers to clarify the past meaning, it needs temporal adverbs, like “yesterday” or “last night” as shown in (10b). The sentence shown in (10a) expresses the present or neutral situation of “I eat fish”; it can also express the past situation (“I ate fish” if other contexts help), but it is more accurate to add a temporal adverb indicating the past to specify the past situation as shown in (10b). On the other hand, the verb form “a gani” does not have any tense marking.
(10) Nguna (Nose (2007)) a.
Kinau
a
gani
I
1sg eat
naika. fish
“I eat fish.” b.
Kinau
a
gani
I
1sg eat
naika
nanofa.
fish
yesterday
“I ate fish yesterday.”
Negation is expressed using a negative particle in Nguna. The negative marker “taa” (not) expresses the negative past (Schütz 1969: 28) as shown in (11) and (12). However, these sentences do not have any tense marking, and hearers need to use clues from the context or temporal adverbs such as “nanofa” (yesterday) or “tuai“(before). (Schütz 1969: 62–63). 8
(11) e
taa
3sg not
munu. drink
“He did not drink.” (12) eu
taa atae te
3pl not know
na-vatuuna. any thing
”They did not know anything.”
In Nguna, some tense, aspect, and mood (TAM) categories are marked in one form, so called TAM marker. The TAM markers carry the meanings of tense, aspect and mood altogether. These TAM markers are inserted between the subject and the verb. Several TAM markers are as shown in (13). This TAM system is a property of Austronesian languages.
(13) Some TAM markers in Nguna: Kinau a do. “I used to” (habitual) Kinau a gawo.
“I will, I must” (necessity)
Kinau a masau. “I want” (optative)
One TAM makers is the perfective “poo”, as shown in (14) and (15). In (14), the adverb “sua” (already) also helps to give a perfective implication.
Nguna perfective: Schütz (1969: 27) (14) E
poo
3sg perfective
munu
sua.
drink
already
“He has drunk already.”
(15) A
poo
1sg perfective
punusi see
a. 3sg 9
“I have seen him”.
Therefore, Nguna depends on temporal adverbs to specify past tense meaning, but it also has the perfective marker “poo” and it is important in Nguna to know whether the action has been completed or not. Second, Chinese (Sino-Tibetan, China) is famous for its tenselessness (Lin 2012). It does not need past tense marker. Instead, it can use both temporal adverbs, such as “yesterday” or “last month”, and, at the same time, aspect markers like “le”, which can indicate past meaning, as shown in (16a–c).
(16) Chinese (Lin 2012: 673): a.
Lisi dapo
huaping.
Lisi break(-perfective)
vase
“Lisi broke a vase.” b.
Lisi zuotian
dapo
Lisi yesterday break
huaping. vase
“Lisi broke a vase yesterday.” c.
Lisi dapo-le
huaping.
Lisi break-aspect marker vase “Lisi broke a vase.”
In (16a), the verb “dapo” (break) does not have any marker, nor any temporal adverb, but it can indicate a past meaning. Because the verb form “dapo” contains a perfective meaning lexically (break-perf), it can imply that the action happened in the past. The mechanism of the sentence (16b) is almost the same in Nguna (10b). The temporal adverb “zuotian” (yesterday) in (16b) is used to indicate that the action happened yesterday. In (16c), the perfective marker “le” is used to express that the action is already done, and this usage is frequently observed to imply a past meaning. According to my Chinese consultant, the sentences in (16) are 10
semantically different each other, but Chinese speakers prefer to use (16c) to translate the Japanese “yonda” (I read) or the English “I read. Thus, some studies claim that the aspect marker “le” in practice implies the past. However, the marker “le” has an aspect meaning, and so Chinese is considered not to have a formal means of generating past tense, and is thus a tenseless language. In the negative past in Chinese, the aspect marker “le” cannot appear, as shown in (17a– c).
(17) Negative past (Setoguchi 2003: 122–124): a.
Wo mai shuiguo
le.
I
perfective
buy fruit
“I bought a fruit.” b.
Ta mei(-you)
mai shuiguo.
he not
buy fruit
“He did not buy a fruit.” c.
*Ta mei(-you)
mai shuiguo
le.
He
buy fruit
perfective
not
(17a) is a perfective affirmative sentence using the marker “le”. The example (17b) is the negative past; note that the perfective maker “le” disappears, because the marker “le” cannot be allowed in the negative past situation, as shown in (17c). The negative past meaning implies that the action is not completed, and therefore the perfective marker “le” cannot be allowed. The experiential marker “guo” can also imply the past tense (18a), but it does have an experiential meaning. The marker “guo” can appear even in a negative past sentence, as shown in (18b), because of its experiential meaning, as “non-experience” can also be a kind of “experience”. 11
(18) Perfective: “guo” (Setoguchi 2003: 130): a.
women we
chi-guo
Zhongguocai.
eat-perfective
Chinese food
“We have eaten Chinese food.” b.
women we
mei(-you) not
chi-guo
Zhongguocai.
eat-perfective
Chinese food
“We have not eaten Chinese food.”
Overall, Chinese does not have any grammatical tense; instead, the aspect markers “le” and “guo” imply a past meaning, and temporal adverbs are also used to indicate the past meaning too. The aspect markers “le” and “guo” differ slightly in terms of whether they can be used in the negative past: the marker “le” disappears in the negative past, whereas “guo” remains. This is because the marker “le” with negation indicates “the action is not completed”, while the marker “guo” with negation indicates “the uncompleted action is completed”.
4. Discussion This section discusses the past tense usages in contrastive terms. The languages in Papua New Guinea have quite different grammars from typical European languages (Foley 2000), and it is also remarkable that tenseless languages nevertheless do have a way of expressing past meaning. Thus, these two types of languages (tense-rich and tenseless) indicate that there is a wide range of grammatical possibilities for expressing the past tense. These sample languages form the past tense in different ways from English and other European languages. This study aims to find the functional characteristics of the past tenses by looking at tense-rich and tenseless languages and explaining each mechanism. The data on the sample languages is summarized in Table 4. In this section, we will discuss how temporal adverbs function in the past tense and what kinds of effects tense-rich/tenseless languages have (particularly, we measure morphological burden of past tense marking). 12
[Table 4. here]
In Table 4, we can see that the tense-rich languages have remoteness distinctions in the past tense, generally formed via verbal morphology.5 However, the perfective meaning is realized lexically using the temporal adverb “already” (exception: the perfective tense in Kobon, Davies 1989). In contrast, tenseless languages have no past tense marker and their verbal inflections are not complicated. Instead, they have perfective marker(s) and their forms are independent from the verbal morphology. First, this study considers the roles of temporal adverbs. Theoretically, the tenseless languages can specify the past using temporal adverbs and thus can express past meaning without any tense marker. For example, Nguna needs the temporal adverb “nanofa” (yesterday) to specify the past meaning, as shown in (19).
(19) Nguna (Nose 2007): Kinau
a
gani
I
1sg eat
naika
nanofa.
fish
yesterday
“I ate fish yesterday.”
In Chinese, the marker “le” is necessary, as shown in in (20a); the sentence indicates a perfective meaning and partly carries a past tense meaning. The sentence (20b), without “le”, is not acceptable, even though the temporal adverb “yesterday” indicates the past. Thus, the temporal adverbs is not sufficient to express the past meaning in Chinese, and the aspect marker “le” co-occur with the temporal adverb in the past.
(20) Chinese: a.
Zuotian
wo mai-le
Yesterday
I
taozi．
buy-perfective a peach 13
“I bought a peach yesterday.” b.
*Zuotian wo mai taozi.
In Amele, the verbal morphology of “yesterday’s past” cannot co-occur with the temporal adverb “the day before yesterday”, as shown in (21b). This is because the verbal structure has already specified the “yesterday’s past” tense, and a conflict arises from the tense difference between “yesterday’s past” in the verb and the temporal adverb “the day before yesterday”. The basic rule in Amele is that the verbal tense marker has priority in terms of indicating tense information, and thus that the temporal adverb should match the past reference in the verb.
(21) Amele: a.
Ija
hu-g-an
cum.
I
come-yesterday’s past/1sg
yesterday
“I came yesterday.” b.
* Ija
hu-g-an
eren.
I
come-yesterday’s past/1sg
the day before yesterday
“I came (*yesterday/*the day before yesterday).”
Temporal adverbs can help indicate the exact time of the action – “yesterday” or “a week ago”—. However, if is the verb contains the remote tense marker, the temporal adverbs (“yaar osona” (last year), week osol hedocob “a week ago”) become key to specifying the exact time in the past that is being referred to. Next, we discuss the effect(s) of tense-richness/tenselessness. This study found that there are many languages differ from the English system of one present and one past tense. This study has shown the extreme examples – tense-rich languages and tenseless languages. This section considers the effects of rich tenses. Amele and Ma Manda, the tense-rich languages, have complicated verbal morphology and they do not need to use temporal adverbs 14
because the verb forms have already indicated the time in the past that has being referred to (the near or remote past meanings of the verb). In contrast, they have poor grammar in aspect (generally, tense and aspect meanings are related to each other and their distributions are balanced). Furthermore, Amele makes a distinction between the positive and the negative in the past and future tenses through verbal morphology. Because these languages put tense information in the verb, verbs are thus weightier in functional terms (cf. type 2). Instead, Nguna and Chinese, the tenseless languages, lack a complicated verbal morphology and they have simple verb forms. These verbs do not carry tense information. Typologically, these tenseless languages are more common(Figure 1; 88 languages in Dahl and Velupillai 2005) than tense-rich languages, this study considers that light verbal morphology is the preferred means to indicate past tense information (cf. type 3 in (22)). The functional frameworks for how the sample languages construct the past tense are summarized in (22). Speakers of different languages look at past events through different lenses, and the grammars of their languages reflect these lenses.
(22) Functional frameworks of the past tense: Type 1: English and Japanese: “study–studied”; non-past and one past (happened or not) Type 2: Amele and Ma Manda: “study–studied (today; yesterday; remote)”; several past points (when happened) Type 3: Nguna and Chinese: “study–study (tenseless)”; realis or irrealis (completed or not); Type 3 languages make a clear distinction between realis (past, present) and irrealis (future) (Nose 2017).
When tense information is incorporated into verbal morphology,6 as shown in Amele and Ma Manda, verbal inflections for person number and for tense forms are fused. These word formations imply that tense information is related to person and number, i.e. the participants. Moreover, Amele and Ma Manda distinguish between the near past and the remote past, a distinction that is realized in the grammar, because speakers of the languages want to be able 15
to express whether the action happened today/yesterday or previously. Thus, the tense-rich languages carry the morphological burden of specifying these past meanings. In contrast, Chinese and Nguna, the tenseless languages, do not indicate how or what people did; instead they concern themselves with the action only and whether the action is completed or not or whether the action really happened. Temporal adverbs are one key to identifying the time reference, but they are still outside of argument structure and they can keep their verb forms simpler.
5. Conclusion This study argues that Amele and Ma Manda have a remoteness distinction between the near and remote past, because they have grammatical markers of each tense in verbal morphology. Additionally, Amele has an interest in distinguishing between positive and negative situations, as well as between positive and negative past tenses. These tense-rich languages incorporate the past event into the verbal morphology, which means the participants and the past event are closely interlinked. These types of languages are found in New Guinea and other areas, but they are rarer than tenseless languages. In contrast, Nguna and Chinese, the tenseless languages, express the past tense with the help of temporal adverbs, and thus they express whether the action is completed or not. They do not focus on the relationship between the participants and the past event. Instead, these languages are interested in perfective/imperfective actions. To specify such perfective meaning, they may use an aspect marker. Tenselessness is found in Sino-Tibetan and Austronesian languages, and moreover, such languages are typologically not rare (tenseless languages can be found even in New Guinea). These findings indicate that there are many type 1 languages, such as English (one past tense only), as shown in (22), but that there are other grammatical possibilities for expressing the past tense, namely Tense-rich (type 2) and tenseless (type 3) languages. Dahl and Velupillai (2005) show that major grammatical tendency is for tenseless languages or for languages with one past tense, meaning that complicated tense morphology (type 2) is 16
“over-grammaticalized” or an “extra system”.
Acknowledgements I would like to thank Neret Tamo and the villagers in Sein, Madang Province, Papua New Guinea for their data and kindness. I claim sole responsibility for any errors. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 15K02478. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 8th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference, University of Athens, Greece (May, 25–28, 2017). I am grateful to the audience for their comments and criticisms of earlier versions of the paper.
Notes 1. Dahl (2001) claimed that there is an exception, Maybrat, Papua New Guinea, which does not have any tense or aspect marker.
2. There are two languages that have the present tense and four or more remoteness distinctions. These languages are Chácobo and Yagua, which are spoken in South America.
3. It might be better to conduct a field interview with the Ma Manda people on the spot, but the descriptive grammar of Pennington (2015) is comprehensive and reliable for this study.
4. König and Gast (2009: chapter 1) discuss the importance of a contrastive study of English and German. They emphasize the pedagogical effect of language learning; however, the present study does not contribute to language learning. This study tries to answer the question of why some languages have functionally complicated tenses and other languages have no tense function at all, by contrasting the sample languages.
5. There is another possibility for past tense morphology. Lecard (2012) showed the nominal tense in Somali, as shown in (i). It is a characteristic of this language that the past tense 17
marker is added to the noun. (i) Somali (Lecard 2012: 706): Madaxweyni-hii President-past focus
wuu
dhintay. die-past
“The president died.”
6. Bybee et al. (1994: 55–56) claimed that there are three original meanings of the past tense, indicated in three ways: using stative verbs (have, remain, wait), dynamic verbs (finish, be finished), or directional adverbs (away, up, into). However, the morphological origins of the near/remote past tenses in Amele and Ma Manda are uncertain. We consider the tense forms in Amele, as shown in the following Table 5.
[Table 5. here]
Today’s past and yesterday’s past have the same origin “-ga-”, but the remote past has another origin, “om”. Nevertheless, although their original meanings are unclear, the past meanings can be divided into near (today and yesterday) versus far (remote).
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Past tense usages in tense-rich and tenseless languages: a contrastive study
Abstract This study seeks to contrast languages with a rich tense system and those without tenses. In particular, this study focuses on the past tense forms in the four sample languages—Amele, Ma Manda, and Nguna from the South Pacific, and Mandarin Chinese. Amele and Ma Manda have rich tense systems with remoteness distinctions, while Nguna and Chinese are well-known for their tenselessness. This study examines the four languages and their past tense features, and discusses the links between formal tense markers and the meaning. This study claims that Amele and Ma Manda have a remoteness distinction between the near and remote past, because they focus on the difference between the present and past. In contrast, Nguna and Chinese, the tenseless languages, express the past tense with the help of temporal adverbs or perfective aspect marker, and thus express whether or not the action is completed. These findings indicate that the difference between tense-rich and tenseless languages can be explained by each morphological burden.
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