Tightness of Link between Past Marker and Verb (Feature 45)
From Apics
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Feature Annotation
This feature asks how tightly combined the (overt) past marker and the verb form are, especially which elements (if any) may intervene between the past marker and the verb.
If your language has no overt past marker, please choose value 6. (These languages are of the aspectual type, cf. Feature 49.)
If your language has an overtperfective past marker as well as an overt imperfective past marker, choose the past marker which is used in imperfective contexts (typically with stative predicates to denote past and with nonstative predicates to denote past progressive or past habitual).
Additional remarks
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Values
| Value | Value Annotation | |
| 1 | Past marker is a (phonologically fused) affix | Nothing can intervene between past marker and verb stem, and the past marker is part of the verb word: Sri Lanka Malay Anak nasi si-makan. [child rice past-eat] ’The child ate rice.’ |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | Past marker is a particle, but nothing can intervene | |
| 3 | Past marker is a particle, only grammatical markers can intervene | Grammatical markers such as pronouns or negative, aspect and mood markers can come between the past marker and the verb: Belizean wi me de wok fu Shell [we past prog work for Shell] ’We were working for Shell.’ Guinea Bissau Creole N kume-l ba. [I eat-it past] ’I ate it.’ |
| 4 | Past marker is a particle, a few lexical items can intervene | Especially temporal adverbs can come between the past marker and the verb in some languages: Papiamentu Wenchi tabata blo pensa riba [Wenchi past=prog just think about Chalito. Chalito] ’Wenchi was just thinking of Chalito.’ |
| 5 | Past marker is a particle, open-class items can intervene | Noun phrases or adpositional phrases may come between the past marker and the verb. |
| 6 | No past marker exists | |
WALS No.
(None)
