Nominal TAM

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Nominal TAM is the indication of tense, aspect or mood by inflecting a noun, rather than a verb. In clausal nominal TAM, the noun indicates TAM information about the clause.

Whether or not a particular language is best be understood as having clausal nominal TAM can be controversial, and there are various borderline cases. A language that can indicate tense by attaching a verbal clitic to a noun (such as the -'ll clitic in English) is not generally regarded as using nominal TAM.

Types and prevalence of nominal TAM

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Related grammatical phenomena

This section is intended for listing phenomena that resemble nominal TAM but are not widely regarded as examples of it, and briefly explaining why not.

Verbal clitics

Although verbal clitics such as -'ll in English are attached to nouns and indicate TAM information, they are not really examples of nominal TAM because they are clitics rather than inflections and therefore not part of the noun at all. This is easily seen in sentences where the clitic is attached to another part of speech, such as "The one you want'll be in the shed".

Another way to tell the difference is to consider the following hypothetical dialogue:

"I thought you said that she read the book."
"No, I said she will read the book." [as opposed to] "No, I said she'll read the book." [wrong in this context]

The speaker cannot emphasise the future time by placing voice stress on she'll, and so instead uses the expanded phrase she will. This is characteristic of clitics as opposed to inflections (i.e. clitics cannot be emphasised by placing voice stress on the word to which they are attached).

To appreciate the significance of this, compare it with a second hypothetical dialogue, using the English negative suffix -n't (which is best understood as an inflection rather than a clitic):

"I thought you said that it is a good book."
"No, I said it is not a good book." [or] "No, I said it isn't a good book." [equally correct]

In this case the speaker could choose to say isn't rather than is not. Even though the stress then falls on the syllable IS, the meaning of the sentence is understood as emphasising the NOT. This indicates that isn't is one inflected word rather than a word with a clitic attached.

(Parts of the above arguments about clitics and inflections are paraphrased from The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum.)

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