On syntactic tense in Mandarin Chinese

– Yes: Huang (1982), Li (1985), Tang (1990), Tang (2000), Lin (2012) (among others) – syntactic evidence from control constructions, distribution of auxiliaries and aspect; Sybesma (2007) — adverbial distribution. – No: Hu et al. (2001) – no tense morphology, syntactic evidence from control constructions; Smith and Erbaugh (2005); Lin (2006; 2010) – semantic evidence (aspect + temporal interpretation rules + discourse). – Arguments are built on indirect evidence. – This talk: Yes, Mandarin Chinese has syntactic tense, alternating between future jiang (將) and an unpronounced non-future. – Why is this question important? ∗ Chinese is frequently thought of and described as a tenseless language. To what extent is this description adequate or fair? ∗ How similar or different is clause structure in Chinese, relative to other languages that have tense / have been analyzed as having tense? ∗ Influential discussions of tense systems in natural languages e.g. Klein (1994) and Comrie (1985) suggest that very few languages make a future vs. non-future distinction1 — if this proposal is on the right track, to what extent can we still say that this distinction is typologically rare? ∗Special thanks to the NACCL-27 organizers. I am grateful to the help and feedback by Valentine Hacquard, Howard Lasnik, Colin Phillips, Alexander Williams, and other members of the UMD S-Lab community. Comments welcome at [email protected] 1Comrie (1985) reports only one language (Hua, a Papuan language) known to have a future vs. non-future distinction. 1 Preliminaries