The Expression of Temporal Meaning in Caboverdean

Fernanda Pratas

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9783110668247
• eBook ISBN: 9783110608687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

One hot topic in contemporary linguistics concerns how we express the passage of time in natural language. In particular, interesting questions have been raised as to how formerly understudied languages fit into deep-rooted theoretical frameworks, which among other features comprise a grammatical category of tense.

This monograph mainly contributes to this debate in two complementary ways: through a detailed description of a large set of new data from two varieties of Caboverdean, a Portuguese-related language, and through a novel approach to the role of its few temporal morphemes, which allows to better define how tense meanings, aspect, and mood, together with other linguistic and extralinguistic information, provide what we understand as past, present, and future.

The adequate study of this non-standardized language, with its impressive internal variation, thus brings new insights to old theoretical problems. Additionally, a welcome side effect of these new descriptions and analyses is that they promote a scientifically grounded attitude towards linguistic diversity.

1 Questions and goals

When I’m gone / When I’m gone / You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.¹

In the best-known ancient tales from diverse cultural traditions, tragic facts bring about moral teachings and intrigue. Lovers, for instance, may really die, and thus force into bereavement their survivors on earth. Others will rather become spirits and move themselves to new dimensions, from where they keep steering those left behind. Or they may as well be converted into stars, and then just shine forever in the Milky Way. So there is much variation in how each person copes with loss, but these key life changes are everywhere.

And this may be viewed as evidence that we are this kind of natural-born presentists, often anxious about the future and nostalgic of things past. Imagine however that, along with this conscious impression, we also prove to be quite at ease with this quantum universe where, according to physicists and philosophers, no timeline exists. We have recently discovered a lot about how the brain measures time at different scales (neuroscience), and about how we distort time according to the pleasure or pain of each experience (cognitive sciences), but whether our collective perception is better captured by presentism or eternalism is still open to debate.

This book contains no philosophical discussion of how we seem to value the present when we come to think of life and death and the meaning of it all. To that end, any study under a linguistic perspective should certainly include the most overt statements about the topic, as well as metaphors which play around with secondary meanings—our goals being in the conceptual domain of time, favourite metaphors include those denoting properties about its passage, generally through a parallelism with motion, and thus with space (sand sifting, a river flowing, an arrow flying), and also about its effects on existing beings (a trap, a healer, a curse, a mighty sculptor). These metaphors, together with overt propositions about time, are the subject of another research project, to be carried out in collaboration with areas as distinct as philosophy of language, neuroscience, cognitive sciences, anthropology and literary studies, or even in multidisciplinary teams bringing together the findings from all these fields. The focus here is instead on the linguistic representations of different temporal values. They may hint at those notions, and this is one point to be defended, but human language is nevertheless the main area of research.

One may observe a quite familiar utterance as the last verse quoted above, from an American folk-pop song. It points to at least two instants in the future, which is itself very complex—under some analyses, we are talking about a nonexistence. And yet the predicates there are said to be marked for present. Moreover, when the recipient of a message like this gives it a second thought, they may recall narratives and arguments about past, present, and future situations, and others which might have been—if a few things had turned out differently, perhaps the sentence would have never been uttered in the first place. In this scenario, how exactly should we organise the mentioned situations on the single, straight timeline we know from textbooks? To put this another way, we may be located in that special moment we call present, but how this relates to some situations we discuss is unclear, as is the case in another verse: ‘it sure would be prettier with you.’ What time is the speaker talking about? And we all know a myriad of settings that raise the same sensation of parallel meanings.²

The rationale guiding this study is thus as follows. Our faculty of language generates expressions which establish still poorly understood links between what we pronounce, on the one side, and our thoughts and abstract notions, on the other. So there is a certain wormhole quality to it: one promising way to explore concepts of time mostly ingrained in the human mind is by diving into the detailed analysis of the temporal meanings in these linguistic expressions, as they are produced within spontaneous descriptions and narratives—that is, when we are not exactly talking about time but employ all sorts of time notions in our discourse about other matters. And in fact we constantly tell about unfolding situations as related to each other, in complex dynamic designs with different layers, always mixing and changing and pulling one another. The first assumption here is therefore that these narrative skills seem to relate much better to the recent descriptions of our quantum world than to any conventional timeline symbolised by an expanding arrow, as if it were drawn by a moving train constantly dropping passengers along the way. In other words, the current study will lead to the hypothesis that our expression of situations rather hints at our relationship with time as that intricate web constantly evolving around us.

More specifically, the premise explored is that the temporal location of situations, as we denote them in our everyday discourse, is somehow anchored to the viewpoint we assume (and this is quite uncontroversial) but this relation is better apprehended by linguistic analyses that consider those layers disorderly changing everywhere (and this is the innovation here). This reasoning applies to temporal meanings expressed by diverse constellations of lexical items, and these may of course include temporal morphemes.

In practice, this translates into this main proposal: linguistic manifestations previously identified through ‘past’ labels—even their appearance in other temporal environments has been taken as if they were expressing some type of ‘fake past’—rather express a value at an entirely distinct layer of temporal substance, which is related to the notion of (low) accessibility. Under my current terms, low accessibility indeed concerns a variety of past situations, but also (and equally) many situations among those clearly not located in the past. When we try to understand the temporal locations of the latter—that is, when it comes to account for the quite trivial temporal notions in our daily lives, which is of course different than when we arrange a given list of historical facts chronologically—any conventional timeline is the least suitable of all possible models.

One cautionary claim is needed at this point. Although, as was said above, a lot is still to be known about the connections between the abstract notions in our minds and the expressions generated by our faculty of language, this monograph is certainly distanced from any premise that the particular languages we acquire in childhood shape our conceptions of the world.³ This rejection means that we may start the exploration of this wormhole by using the entries made available in any particular language, as long as the desired universal implications are well motivated and sustained. For reasons to be defined in the next subsections, this attempt is here empirically supported with data from Caboverdean, a Portuguese-related language whose abundant grammatical challenges are still largely understudied. The theoretical approach is grounded on the central questions of generative grammar, and therefore, if this line of inquiry proves itself as valid, it may be used in other crosslinguistic analyses.

This introductory chapter presents a brief alignment of the central questions guiding this study (1.1), followed by the framework used in dealing with the linguistic discussions (1.2), a description of relevant aspects of the history of the language (1.3), the methodology to gather the linguistic data (1.4), and an overview of the next chapters (1.5).

1.1 Starting points

Any revelations of modern physics and philosophy about the nature of our universe, be they the laws of spacetime or the increasing entropy of a quantum world, immediately motivate the perplexing admission of how wrong our mind is. This can be put as a question: how is the notion of a present moment so obvious that we value this instant beyond reason, when at least some of us are finding remarkable evidence that no time variable is included in the fundamental equations of the universe?

First, after the general relativity theory of Einstein, which elaborated on Minkowski’s spacetime and provided a synthesis for Aristotle’s and Newton’s logical ideas, time in the universe was revealed as a fourth dimension, interlaced with the three spatial dimensions that we already knew. And then, more recently, the theories of quantum gravity go even further and deny the existence of spacetime. This is how the physicist and philosopher Carlo Rovelli puts it: “At the most fundamental level that we currently know of […] there is little that resembles time as we experience it. There is no special variable ‘time’, there is no difference between past and future, there is no spacetime” (Rovelli 2018: 110). Under this scientific approach the universe is a complex structure of layers that stretch, bend, push and pull one another, creating dynamic patterns and relations which happen disorderly. There is no time variable but there are “variables that change in relation to each other. Time, as Aristotle suggested, is the measure of change” (Rovelli 2018: 56).⁴

So where did we get this idea that only the present is real, or special? An obvious answer is that we live a profound, collective illusion: our universe behaves in its own way and we, poor limited beings, live according to totally different parameters. But… do we? This question requires a multi-layered approach, for two main reasons here stated as strategic, complementary doubts:

(i)

given that we belong to this same universe, and that we (discount the abusive first-person plural here) are the ones finding the laws of thermodynamics, the notion of spacetime, and then the intricate properties of a quantum world, is it logically possible that we persistently live under such an erroneous impression?

(ii)

since the notion of a present moment on a single timeline is also classically invoked in linguistic studies, in all their forms and theoretical approaches, could it be the case that this traditional body of knowledge, supported by old views about the universe and our relationship with it, is obfuscating/obstructing any possible advancements as to how we essentially process time, beyond the impressions caused by our discourse about its passage?

We know that any tick of the clock, rise of the sun, and beat of the heart are among the constant signs of change in our daily world. From our perspective, these phenomena—their relative regularity—can be taken to measure time, which in turn we need to consciously locate other situations. This means that we daily use events to establish a time reference for other events’ location and duration, and to feed expectations about what comes next. According to physicists, philosophers, and neuroscientists, among others, this is how our memory works, and this is what we do with history—or with the tempos in music. How this functions exactly is still unbeknownst to us, but it does not seem incompatible with an observation as this: honestly, when we are not speaking about time—like complaining about its swiftness, or proclaiming how it heals or kills—but rather use time notions to report on other subjects that are important to us, what we express relates more to an intricate design that is all but a well-arranged line of past, present, and future facts.

The basic question that guides this book may therefore be moving in either direction, as follows:

(a)	how does our perception of time shape the linguistic expressions we choose while narrating all sorts of situations or telling about beliefs and desires?
(b)	how can we productively use these linguistic expressions as the said wormhole granting us access to the time notions mostly ingrained in our minds?

The remainder of this section elaborates on such points.

1.1.1 Time in physics and philosophy

The physicist Richard Feynman said that “Maybe [we can] face the fact that time is one of the things we probably cannot define (in the dictionary sense), and just say that it is what we already know it to be: it is how long we wait!” (Feynman 2010[1963]: 5-2). Then he adds: “What really matters anyway is not how we define time, but how we measure it. One way of measuring time is to utilize something which happens over and over again in a regular fashion—something which is periodic” (ibid). And this is of course circular, since to know that something is periodic, or regular, we need to first measure the time that separates subsequent instances. This means that whenever we speak about time we necessarily end up talking about events, and if we speak about time measuring we end up talking about repeated events. Sometimes we want to know which occurred first, and which one later, if any pair occurred at the same time, or if any parts of them overlapped while others did not. Importantly, we use the moment where we are when we do these calculations as a reference for everything else. This is however different than being part of any collective illusion:

[…] our vision of the world is blurred because the physical interactions between the part of the world to which we belong and the rest are blind to many variables.

This blurring is at the heart of Boltzmann’s theory. From this blurring, the concepts of heat and entropy are born—and these are linked to the phenomena that characterize the flow of time. The entropy of a system depends explicitly on blurring. It depends on what I do not register, because it depends on the number of indistinguishable configurations. […] This does not mean that blurring is a mental construct; it depends on actual, existing physical interactions. Entropy is not an arbitrary quantity, nor a subjective one.

Rovelli (2018: 83)

That our blurred vision of ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Questions and goals
• 2 Lexical items in the functional domain
• 3 A view from subordination
• 4 Tense
• 5 The most of times
• 6 Final remarks
• Index