I am working on a Bantu A90 language (considered by Guthrie to be Sub-Bantu). We have four past tense markers, and I am working through some very helpful tests from Seth Cable right now for determining their range of meaning. However, for the future tenses I am finding little work done. Can you recommend any articles I could read where the tests are described in detail regarding future tense semantics?
I could imagine that there are some tests in Rebecca T. Cover's chapter "Semantic fieldwork on TAM" in "Methodologies in Semantic Fieldwork", edited by M. Ryan Bochnak and Lisa Matthewson. Conceptually, the important thing is of course to make up one's mind on whether "all futures are modal" or not - in the latter case you will have to chose your test sentences very carefully, guaranteeing that informants are really sure that the main proposition does hold at some later time.
Tabea Reiner - Thanks for your feedback. I have the TAM chapter on semantic fieldwork and it is helpful. Seth Cable says, "I will adopt the commonly held view that future is not really a ‘tense’; rather, it is a modal or aspectual category." So, perhaps the first consideration would be whether or not to consider the future markers as tenses at all. Do you have any recommendations for reading on that subject?
The dominating view seems to be that futures are modal categories (especially in grammaticalization literature). However, so called "realis futures" have been reported, see Mithun 1995:385, who seems to have coined the term, but also Bybee et al. 1994:247–248, Elliott 2000:68, 70–71, Tournadre 2016:625, 627.
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- Bybee, Joan, Revere D. Perkins & William Pagliuca (1994): The evolution of grammar. Tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Elliott, Jennifer R. (2000): Realis and Irrealis. Forms and concepts of the grammaticalisation of reality. Linguistic Typology, 4(1), 55–90.
- Mithun, Marianne (1995): On the relativity of irreality. In Joan Bybee & Suzanne Fleischman (eds.), Modality in grammar and discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins (Typological Studies in Language, 32), 369–388.
- Tournadre, Nicolas (2016): The future tenses in the Tibetic languages. Diachronic and dialectal perspectives. In Zlatka Guentchéva (ed.), Aspectuality and temporality: Descriptive and theoretical issues. Amsterdam: Benjamins (Studies in Language Companion Series, 172), 625–641.
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