Future/Non-Future binary tense in Mandarin and Cantonese: evidence from the future-in-the-past
Résumé
Based on the distribution of future in the past readings and, more generally, of time adverbs in temporally/aspectually bare sentences vs. sentences with a futurity marker, we defend a binary tensed analysis for Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese. Not only do Mandarin and Cantonese have a silent NonFuture tense (Sun 2014, Huang 2015, and Chen & Husband 2018, Sun & Demirdache 2022, Demirdache & Sun to appear), but they also have an overt futurity marker with absolute time reference. This proposal goes against the classic pronominal tense analysis which assumes superficially tenseless languages to have a unary Non-Future tense system and, more generally, the assumption found in the literature that tenseless languages such as Guaraní (Tonhauser 2011, Pancheva & Zubizarreta 2023), but also Cantonese (Lee, Pancheva & Zubizarreta 2022), prohibit absolute future reference times.