The VP operator analysis of tenses and the puzzle of tenseless languages

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that a 'dynamic' implementation of the VP operator analysis of tenses, as in Muskens 1995, can serve as the basis for a treatment of tense less languages, capturing certain morphosyntactic facts in a less stipulative way that alternative analyses of tenses as pronoun like. I provide evidence from one language, West Grccnlandic, for the existence of tenseless languages and argue that these can be analysed in terms of Muskens' approach to temporal interpretation. On this approach, the burden of encoding temporal information falls mostly on the VP, VPs manipulating the position of the reference time in different ways depending on their aspectual class, with tenses simply adding conditions on the reference time, requiring it to. be before, after, or at speech time. Since tenses on this approach are VP operators, interpreted as functions from predicates to predicates, they should in principle be omissible, consistent with the hypothesized tenselessness of West Greenlandic. Such an approach suggests that true tenselessness entails neither a radical indeterminacy in the temporal interpretation of tenseless sentences nor radically different descriptions of tensed and tenseless languages, as some have claimed.