Nominal aspect in Marori

Abstract

This paper discusses nonverbal TAM (Tense-Aspect-Mood), focusing on the completive perfective stative aspect marked by -on in Marori (a Papuan language of Southern New Guinea). The nonverbal aspect is grammatical in nature, with its coding local but possibly imposing a nonlocal morphosyntactic constraint on the clausal auxiliary verb. In terms of Nordlinger and Sadler�s (2004) typology, Marori nonverbal aspect marking belongs to two types: the Independent Nominal and the Propositional Nominal Aspect types. It is demonstrated that its broad aspectual meaning, in terms of Reichenbach�s notation, is [E-R, S], which is exactly the same as the Present Perfect in English. While having this similar broad meaning as with English, its morphosyntactic realisation and constraints in the grammar are quite different. An LFG analysis accounting for the distribution of -on is proposed, making use of the inside-out mechanism to account for the non-local constraint of -on, which extends to the clausal TAM. Show more