The semantics of Sibe and Mongolian temporal only words in a contrastive perspective of Mandarin and three SAE languages

In this presentation we compare the semantics of temporal only words (Neeleman & van det Koot 2022) in three eastern Asian languages (Mandarin cái, Sibe =sini, and Khalkha Mongolian döngöj) and three standard average European languages (German erst, Dutch pas and Czech teprve). We focus on Sibe and (Khalkha) Mongolian, languages where the studied phenomenon has not been scrutinized so far. In a contrastive perspective of three European and one contact language, the aim of this study is to investigate intriguing similarities and contrasts in usage of temporal only words in these two languages of East Asia and to refine concepts for further cross-linguistic comparison.

Data: For Sibe, we use a sample of transcribed texts (ca. 33,000 words) supplemented by other datasets, collected during fieldwork and consultations with native speakers. For Mongolian, transcribed texts at The Oral History of Twentieth Century Mongolia are used in addition to consultations with native speakers. For the rest of the languages, we rely mainly on published data: German (König 1979, 1991), Dutch (Neeleman & van der Koot 2022, Mandarin (Hole 2004, Lai 1999, among others, in addition to consultations) and we use selective data from public corpora, especially for Czech (Intercorp, using a Treq application), to support our analyses.

Analyses: We examine several semantic features that have been stated in the literature, namely progression semantics (low degree of progress) and presence of a particle with an opposite high progress meaning (‘already’); two basic uses paraphrased as ‘not until’ (1) and ‘no later/no more than’ (2) (König 1979, 1991, Neeleman & van der Koot 2022), and three semantic properties we consider derived uses of temporal only words: scalar evaluative use (3) (cf. Hole 2015), conditional use (4), and emphatic use (5) (cf. Lai 1999, Hole 2004). The relevance of all these features to cross-linguistic research (ie. their usability as comparative concepts) is examined.

Preliminary results: As a defining feature, temporal only words in all the examined languages have progression semantics. However, Mongolian situation is slightly more complicated with the temporal only meaning being distributed among three expressions, and an ‘already’ word being absent. Of the two basic uses, the ‘not until’ use is present in all the languages while the ‘no later/no more than’ use is not found in Sibe, which may be explained by the scope restriction of =sini (cf. König 1979:157).

The derived uses of temporal only words are shared by some of the examined languages: (i) a scalar evaluative use is found in Mandarin and Mongolian but not in the European languages and, more surprisingly, also not in Sibe; (ii) an emphatic use (mostly reference to a high degree of a quality) is present in all the examined languages; (iii) a conditional use (necessary condition) is shared by Mandarin and Sibe. Arguably, our results can be biased by the fact that, in the case of Sibe and Mongolian, we analyse primary data in detail, while for other languages such as Mandarin and Dutch, we rely on literature and on verification of hypotheses in published resources. 

In the conclusion we will sketch a simple semantic map of temporal only words on the basis of the investigated languages and show their potential for further cross-linguistic research.