2.2.1 Temporal adverbials
A situation can easily be localised in time using temporal adverbial expressions.
Two elements possible in adverbial expressions must be distinguished: the name of the unit of time, for example, as a date:January the first, and the type of relation between theTSITand the unit of time (e.g.onthe January the first).
As pointed out by Laskowski (2003) there are two types of adverbial temporal expression. After Haspelmath (1997: 25), he calls the first groupcanonical time periodssuch as calendar dates, names of parts of the year, or time units such as an natural languages. Time may be experienced by language users in units measurable on continuous or discrete scales. The expression unit of time is neutral and can mean any part of the time axis of any properties.
2Nevertheless, I do not resign from the study of future temporal reference.
hour or second. Names of events (e.g.breakfast, the Second World War) can also be classified in this category. The second type consists ofsubjective time periods such asa moment.
Some temporal expressions are deictic, as they relateTSITtoTRindirectly, in relation to TIME OF UTTERANCE(TU) such as adverbs –yesterday. TEMPORAL PARTICLES3 (likeyet,alreadyorstill) compare TSITagainst some mental stan-dard, for example, speaker’s expectation of how long the situation shall last, or when it shall terminate.
2.2.2 Deixis
The grammatical category related to temporal localising is TENSE.4 The three primary distinctions of the absolute tenses(Comrie 1985: 36) refer to contrast caused by different relations to theTU:
• TSIT’s overlap or coincidence withTUis represented in English by the Present tense, as in the sentence:
(6) Iam dancing.
• TSIT anterior to TU is represented in English by the Past tense as in the sentence:
(7) Iwas dancing.
• TSITposterior toTUis represented in English by the auxiliary Future tense as in the sentence:
(8) Iwill be dancing.
3Sometimes called aspectual particles.
4Some problems related to accurate definition of tense for the purpose of contrastive or typo-logical studies are given by Haspelmath (1997: 6) who examines the definition of Comrie Comrie (1985: 9): “grammaticalised expression of location in time”. Haspelmath points out several weak-nesses of this definition in comparison to what Comrie really aims to describe in his study. First, the original definition covers morphemes appearing in nominal phrases such as the preposition ‘in’
inin the spring, the Finnish Adessive inkevää-lläor the Polish Instrumental inwiosn- ˛a, which have the same meaning as the English expression. However, including the verbal constraint in the definition would exclude the validity of the definition for languages with the nominal tense. Since neither Polish nor Finnish have the latter category, I consider tense a purely verbal category.
2.2.3 Taxis
SituationS1does not need to be temporally localised in the relation toTU, if it is possible to establish its relation to situationS2for whichTSIThas already been lo-calised. This type of temporal localising is calledTAXIS(Jakobson 1957[1971]).5 An example of taxis marked with tense is shown below:
(9) And when he had said this he disappeared.6
In (9), the tense used in the main sentence clause defines temporal localising prior toTU, while the Pluperfect appearing in the subordinate clause serves two functions. First, it also refers to a situation anterior to TU (absolute temporal localising), and, second, it shows that the situation in dependent clause is anterior to the situation referred in the main clause (temporal localising relativeto the temporal localising of TSIT of the main clause). The Pluperfect could thus be considered anABSOLUTE-RELATIVEtense.
While in some languages taxical relations are expressed with tenses (e.g. in English, as shown above), Maslov (1978: 8-9) notices that in many languages taxis cannot be a separate grammatical category, but is included in a combination of tense and aspect. In such cases, deictic tenses are used in the taxical function, that is, as relative tenses. According to Maslov, expressing taxis is one of the most important function of Slavic Verbal Aspect (see Section 3.8.2).
Taxis can be also expressed lexically, by means of ordering expressions such aslater,afterwards,at the same time.
2.2.4 Relativity of temporal localising
The same temporal properties may be expressed by different means:
(10) a. I bought the car onJanuary the second.
b. I bought the cara week ago.
c. After you had told me to stop biking, I bought the car.
5The understanding of the term taxis. In the present work, the scope of taxis is limited to two clauses belonging to the same sentence or connected with a lexical (e.g. anaphoric) marker. Taxis is examined in terms of theTSITof the dependent clause, or in the case of two clauses connected with a coordinate conjunction,TSITof the clause appearing later in the linear order is relative to theTSITof the first one.
6 https://www.thedivinemercy.org/news/Why-Do-We-Call-Mary-Mother-Of-Mercy-3369
In a particular context, in all three sentences the verbto buycan refer to the same situation, but from different perspectives: in terms of objective date (10a), of deictic distance (10b), and as posterior to some other situation (10c).
Example (10) shows that one temporal dimension can be expressed by various linguistic means. Languages have different inventories of categories with which they express the same temporal dimensions. The category lacking in some lan-guage can be substituted by a combination of some other categories (either lexical or grammatical). For example, although Mandarin Chinese is considered as tense-less language (cf. Lin 2012), the language enables temporal localising in other ways, such as aspectual information, temporal adverbials or discourse anaphora.