Genuinely tenseless: encoding time in Cantonese

Abstract

Languages without overt marking of tense have been commonly analyzed as having covert tense, either in the form of a phonologically null tense morpheme or a post-LF semantic rule. We argue that the notion of (neo-Reichenbachian) tense is not only unnecessary for the analysis of Cantonese, but also falls short of accounting for temporal reference in this language. Following Pancheva & Zubizarreta (2020, 2021) on Paraguayan Guarani, we propose an analysis of Cantonese that manipulates the temporal parameter of the evaluation context in lieu of tense. A more general contribution of this line of work is the proposal that tense is not a semantic universal.