Past Temporal Reference and Remoteness Distinctions in Guajajára

Abstract

Based on original fieldwork, in this paper I explore and present a formal semantic analysis of past temporal reference in Guajajára, a variety of Tenetehára, a Tupí-Guaraní language of Brazil. I examine the empirical behavior and semantic contribution of the morphemes ra’a and ri’i and analyze them as past remoteness morphemes that encode both past and remoteness distinctions. I argue that, like tenses in English, they carry presuppositions about the location of topic times relative to evaluation times and propose an analysis as pronominal/referential past tenses (Partee 1973). Crucially, based on their behavior in certain contexts, I claim that these morphemes form a paradigm to which the principle of Maximize Presupposition applies, patterning similar to the remoteness morphemes in Gĩkũyũ (Cable 2013). This study of past temporal interpretation in Guajajára contributes to the increasing research on graded tense systems and more generally to cross-linguistic variation of temporal interpretation.