Beyond Time - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

Botne & Kershner call these tenors rather than tenses Botne & Kershner (2008:171).
Tenor “situates the event at some location in time in relation to a reference point” within
the currently salient domain. The distinction, then, is whether a marker situates an event
(or the part of the event that is referred to) within a cognitively dissociated world (tense),
or in a prior or future unit of the currently associated world (tenor). This distinction seems
to be an innovation from traditional understandings of tense and aspect.
An example of a tenor belonging to the P-domain is the English Simple Present. The
associative sense explains its use with (e.g. planned) future and (historical present) past
meanings. The -ED suffix, in contrast, belongs to the D-domain, and can mark either past
or irrealis (Botne & Kershner 2008:153-154). It is thus a tense marker, and not a marker of
tenor.
Thus, for Botne & Kershner, tense is the relationship between two domains or cognitive
worlds, and tenor depicts temporal relationships within that world. Aspect “denotes a
particular temporal phase of the narrated event as the focal frame for viewing the event.
This focal frame depicts the status of the event in relation to the vantage point determined
by Ego” (either the speech time or some other contextually determined time) (Botne &
Kershner 2008:171). That is, aspect locates the vantage point in the internal structure of
the situation currently depicted.
Botne & Kershner argue that their model allows for a unified view of tense, aspect, and
mood marking in all of its functions, and can explain tense/aspect “curiosities” in a number
of languages. While Botne & Kershner’s proposal “do[es] not dispute” patterns of historical
developments as discovered by grammaticalization theorists, it deals with TA functions on a
synchronic level; their analysis focuses on explaining and organizing the correlations between
tense and “related verbal deictic phenomena” (Botne & Kershner 2008:160).
As a further example, Botne & Kershner discuss past tense marking in Ekoti (P.30),
a Bantu language of Mozambique. Ekoti has two simple pasts, recent past (P1) and
remote past (P2). Both pasts are perfective, but the Recent Past – though “neither a
perfect. . . nor fully resultative” – connotes current relevance, and is thus assigned by Botne
& Kershner to the P-domain (Botne & Kershner 2008:183). In contrast, the Remote Past has
no such flavor of current relevance, although it may be used even for situations that occurred
a mere day before the time of utterance. Botne & Kershner assign it to the D-domain.
The domain distinction has ramifications in Ekoti syntax. If an active sentence describes
an event that happened long ago and has enduring consequences that are not necessarily of
relevance for the agent, it takes Remote Past (P2) marking. If the same sentence, however,
is passivized, so that the enduring object is the salient entity, the Recent Past (P1) is used.
(Recall from above that P1 is perfective and does not have “fully resultative” semantics.)
An example is of P1 used with a passivized P2 expression is given in (6).
(6) a. azúkú (a-)aa-cek-íyé fortalééza
Portuguese (3pl)-P2-build-P2 fortress
‘the Portuguese built [P2] the fortress’
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