Temporal anaphora in a tenseless language

This chapter presents a portrait of a language that arguably lacks absolute (i.e., deictic) and relative (i.e., anaphoric) tenses and temporal connectives with meanings comparable to those of English after, before, until, and while. The language is Yucatec Maya. “Tenselessness”, the absence of tenses from the grammar of a language, has been documented for a number of languages. Yucatec goes beyond tenselessness in its simultaneous lack of temporal connectives of the indicated kind. However, the emphasis in this chapter is on tenselessness and on the question how Yucatec speakers manage to communicate about time in the face of it. It is assumed in this chapter that tenses express binary ordering relations between the time about which an utterance makes a statement, asks a ques-