When Grammar Tells Day from Night

by Guillaume Jacques

Speakers of European languages are all familiar with the concept of grammatical tense, which is marked in conjugation to show whether an action takes place before (past), during (present), or after (future) the present moment or another reference point. However, there is another type of temporal marking found in certain languages around the world that has little equivalent in Europe: periodic tense.

  

Periodic tense affixes indicate whether an action occurs during a recurring period of the day or year, such as nocturnal tense when the action takes place at night, or matutinal tense if it happens in the morning. This kind of conjugation is primarily found in North American languages like Nez Percé (a Sahaptian language from Idaho) or Algonquian languages, in South American languages such as the Tacanan family and in Papuan languages like Yimas. It is, however, absent from the languages of Eurasia and Africa.

Example (1) illustrates the nocturnal prefix te·w- in Nez Percé, which can be translated into French as a temporal phrase meaning ‘during the night’.

(1)
te·w-c͗íq-ce
NOCTURNAL-speak-PRESENT:SINGULAR
‘I talk at night.’ (Aoki 1994)

You might wonder if this type of conjugation has a broader impact on the language’s grammar—is it simply an adverb integrated into the verb conjugation, without much effect on the language’s overall expressive power? In fact, in some languages, periodic tense allows for redundancy, as in example (2) from Yimas. Here, the idea of “night” is expressed three times: through the nocturnal suffix -kia on both verbs (‘enter’ and ‘eat’) and through the adverb wut (‘at night’).

(2)
wut am-kia-k na-ma-ŋka-pu-kia-k
night eat-NOCTURNAL-UNREAL 3.SINGULAR-inside-go.on.land-distancing-NOCTURNAL-UNREAL
‘He entered to eat at night.’ (Foley 1991:402)

This kind of redundancy is similar to subject-verb agreement in person and number in European languages. Yimas requires its speakers to specify much more explicitly than European languages whether an action takes place at night or not.

For more details on languages with periodic tense affixes, their functions, and historical origins, see the article by Jacques (2023), which is available in open access: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-04239547v1/.

References

Aoki, Haruo. 1994. Nez Perce Dictionary. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Foley, William A. 1991. The Yimas Language of New Guinea. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Jacques, Guillaume. 2023. “Periodic tense markers in the world’s languages and their sources”. Folia Linguistica, 57(3):539-562, https://doi.org/10.1515/flin-2023-2013

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