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Maizer Toosarvandani

UC Santa Cruz

Monday, April 14th at 2 PM in AP&M 4301. Maizer Toosarvandani (UC Santa Cruz) will be presenting. 

The temporal interpretation of clause chaining in Northern Paiute

Languages have a variety of grammatical resources for conveying information about time, including tense and temporal adverbs. Northern Paiute -- a Uto-Aztecan language of the western United States -- frequently uses clause chaining to express temporal relations between clauses, which in English are conveyed by the subordinators "after" or "while". Building on earlier work in which I argue that clause chaining in Northern Paiute has an underlying coordination structure, I propose that their temporal interpretation arises, in part, through the compositional interaction between conjunction and tense-aspect morphology. This aspectual contribution of clause chaining also affects how it is interpreted in the temporal progression of narrative discourse. So in the end, while clause chaining conveys temporal succession or overlap much like the subordinators "after" or "when", it relates to the surrounding discourse in a very different way.