TriCons Notes: Temporal Morphology

[qiihoskeh]

This post covers the morphology of time, aspect, and mood. I'll continue to edit it.

TriCons marks aspect and mood, but not tense. Time is indicated either by adverbs or by indirect means.

Mood

The moods, which apply only to finite forms, include indicative, imperative, and subjunctive. Nominoids have only indicative forms. In verboids, the moods are indicated using stem vowel V1, with the indicative marked using a short vowel /i/ and the others using some stressed long vowel: /e:/ for subjunctive and /o:/ for imperative.

Negative moods for a word are accomplished by placing the negation particle / / before the word.

The mood marked on a complement verb, or implied for an infinitive, may depend on the auxiliary.

Aspect

The principle aspects, perfective and imperfective, are indicated by stem vowel V3, except where implied or not applicable (as for nominals). For infinitives, the vowels are /ii/ if perfective and /aa/ if imperfective; for other forms the vowels are /i/ and /a/.

Two additional aspects, retrospective and prospective, are provided by special "infinitive" forms, used with a "copular" auxiliary verboid /q/ when no other auxiliary is present (The infinitive form of the auxiliary /qe/ isn't needed in this application). The vowels are /ee/ for retrospective and /oo/ for prospective.

The habitual forms use a prefix /hoo/, and an iterative is formed using reduplication of the first stem syllable.

hoopathki, hoopithki (habitual)
papathki, pipithki (iterative)

The process phases (begin, interrupt, resume, and complete) are implemented with auxiliary verboids, as is continuation.

The table of stems is:

    Imperfective        Perfective
    le-pathki-ma      le-pithki-ma  Simple
  le-papathki-ma    le-pipithki-ma  Iterative
le-hoo-pathki-ma  le-hoo-pithki-ma  Habitual
qi-ma le-pootekh                    Prospective
qi-ma le-peetekh                    Retrospective
qi-ma le-paatekh ???                Continuation
                                    Process Phases

State-Change Prefixes

These are the to/via/from state prefixes (/b/, /d/, and /g/) which derive dynamic verboids primarily from 2-consonant statal ones, but also other statal verboids (probably including adjectoids). The prefix vowel provides the principle aspect marking.

Possibly, other additional aspects may be obtained by applying the to/via/from derivational prefixes to the "copular" auxiliary /q/. Here, the infinitive probably has the imperfective form.

Evolutive and Devolutive

These additional aspects apply to adjectoids, the former signifying an increase in degree and the latter a decrease. Adjectoids need continuation forms as well as verboids.

Time

A perfective form can only be non-present. A distal argument usually implies non-present time, except with words of distant perception or in the context of a mental state auxiliary.

There is a future marker on many temporal adverbs to distinguish future from past.

# Possibly use different conjunctions for absolute and relative time in complement and relative clauses.