Beyond Time - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

Chapter 5
Past and Future: Dissociative
Domains
5.1 Introduction
Recall the following table from chapter 3 (repeated here as table 5.1), outlining a proposed
analysis of Totela’s system of completion and dissociation marking:
Form
Proposed
Function
Example
-ka-
Dissociative
(Past)
ndàkànèngà ‘I danced’ (yesterday or before)
-a- Completive ndànèngà ‘I danced’ (today)
-la- Non-completive ndìlànèngà ‘I am dancing/will dance’ (today)
na-
Dissociative
(Future)
nándìlànèngà ‘I will dance’ (tomorrow or after)
Table 5.1: Proposed system of completion and dissociation in Totela
The preceding two chapters showed that -a- and -la- are best analyzed not as markers
of tense, but as relating the discourse-salient perspective time to the point of completion
of a situation’s nucleus. In this chapter, I examine the “prehodiernal” and “posthodiernal”
markers -ka- and na-, and argue that these markers are not aspectual, but rather invoke
“dissociative” domains that are excluded from the day of perspective time. As temporal
dissociators, they are markers of tense in the sense of Botne & Kershner (2008:152-153),
relating the currently evoked cognitive world to another cognitive world, marked as not
included in the current discourse world, in which a referenced situation holds. When cooccurring
with -ka- and -na- (as in table 5.1), -a- and -la- indicate that at some point
in the dissociative domain, which may be further temporally specified with adverbials, the
situation’s nucleus was completed, or not completed, respectively.
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