(Un-)Restricting Tense in Awing

Abstract

In recent years, formal semantic research on the meaning of tense and aspect has benefited from a number of studies investigating languages with graded tense systems. This paper contributes a first sketch of the temporal marking system of Awing (Grassfields Bantu), focusing on two varieties of remote past and remote future. We argue that the data support a "symmetric" analysis of past and future tense in Awing. In our specific proposal, Awing temporal remoteness markers are uniformly analyzed as quantificational tense operators, and both the past and the future paradigm include a form that prevents contextual restriction of this temporal quantifier.