Journal of Semantics Advance Access originally published online on August 24, 2005
Journal of Semantics 2005 22(4):339-387; doi:10.1093/jos/ffh029
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
Future Discourse in a Tenseless Language
Rutgers University
Correspondence: MARIA BITTNER Rutgers University, Linguistics Department, 18 Seminary Place, New Brunswick, NJ 08901–1184 USA. e-mail: mbittner{at}rci.rutgers.edu
The Eskimo language Kalaallisut (alias West Greenlandic) has traditionally been described as having a rich tense system, with three future tenses (Kleinschmidt 1851; Bergsland 1955; Fortescue 1984) and possibly four past tenses (Fortescue 1984). Recently, however, Shaer (2003) has challenged these traditional claims, arguing that Kalaallisut is, in fact, tenseless.
This paper settles the debate, in favour of Shaer, based on text studies examining how the English future auxiliaries will/would and is/was going to are rendered in Kalaallisut translations of five books: Harry Potter, The Old Man and the Sea, Pippi Longstocking (translated from the Swedish), The Blind Colt, and Black Star, Bright Dawn. The results of these five text studies are reported here in detail and in theory-neutral terms. They conclusively show that Kalaallisut is truly tenseless, but has an alternative system that conveys temporal information, even about the future, as precisely as the English tenses.
1 I am not committed to Klein's view: arguably, is/was going to is better analysed as an instance of the present/past tense plus an aspectual auxiliary be going to. My point is that even if one allows tense auxiliaries to be complex, one still will not find any in Kalaallisut.
2 In addition to nouns and verbs, there are particles (e.g., irniinnaq ‘soon’ in (7')), which do not inflect but can combine with clitics. There are also a few derivational clitics, which attach to fully inflected words or particles and derive new bases (e.g., =it- ‘be’ in (27'), =kar- ‘go’ in (33')).
3 I use the standard Kalaallisut orthography, minus the allophones (e, o, f) of i, u, v.
4 Kalallisut translators often disregard sentence boundaries, as in (16'). But they respect paragraph boundaries. I take it that the paragraph is the intuitive unit of equivalence.
5 To capture temporal de se I use non-finite reports in my back-to-English translations, even if this means misrepresenting -nirar, which is neutral like ‘say’, as emotionally charged ‘declare 
to ...’, ‘report to ...’, or ‘claim to ...’.
6 I have corrected [D': 22], which has an ungrammatical nominative: nakursaq taanna.
7 The prospect of Snape being a referee is expected. What is unlikely is his being fair.
8 To be sure, I have used terms that have been theorized about—e.g., event, state, topic time, discourse referent, de se attitude, etc—but I have only used them in their dictionary sense, or in the pretheoretical sense of Klein (1994), Karttunen (1976), or Lewis (1979).