Defining crosslinguistic categories: The case of nominal tense (Reply to Nordlinger and Sadler)*

1. Taking stock. Nordlinger & Sadler 2004 (NS04) brought nominal tense/aspect/ mood (TAM) markers across languages to the attention of the linguistic community and raised many important questions about noun-phrase temporality, lexical categories, and other research areas. In the theoretical literature on noun-phrase temporality, the idea that tense might be a category of noun phrases was considered as early as En9 1981. In her analysis of the temporal interpretation of noun phrases, Enc (1981:41-45) briefly entertains the possibility of noun phrases being interpreted by nominal tense operators that locate the time relative to which a noun phrase is interpreted (i.e. Tonhauser 2007 's (T07) noun-phrase time tnp) relative to the utterance time. En9 ultimately rejects the proposal since nominal tense operators 'do not correspond to tense morphemes' (1981:44), that is, do not have overt morphological counterparts, but also because an analysis according to which the noun-phrase time is contextually determined is more adequate.1 The primary focus of subsequent literature on noun-phrase temporality was to identify structural, semantic, and pragmatic constraints on the location of the noun-phrase time (e.g. Enc 1986, Musan 1995, 1999, Demirdache 1997, Tonhauser 2002). In the context of this research, the empirical domain of which is English, German, and St'at'imcets, that is, languages that do not have nominal temporal markers, N& S's claim that there are languages with nominal tenses is exciting because these languages would provide overt evidence for Enc/s nominal tense operators and promise insight into the way that the noun-phrase time is located.2 My research on Guarani was directly motivated by NS together with Tonhauser 2006 (T06), this constitutes the first detailed, truth-conditional semantic study of such markers in any language. The semantic analysis I provide makes it possible to compare the meaning of the nominal markers to that of verbal tense and verbal aspect markers. Table 1 summarizes the semantic criteria I used in T06 and T07 to establish whether a marker is tense-like. In this table, it is assumed (following e.g. Reichenbach 1947, Smith 1991, Kamp & Reyle 1993, Klein 1994) that verbal tense encodes (or presupposes) a relation between the utterance time and the reference time, and verbal aspect encodes a relation between the reference time and the event time;