Between the birth and death of future tenses
Related languages as a natural lab for research into grammatical change
Björn Wiemer, Eugen Hill, Daniel Kölligan, Jan-Niklas Linnemeier
Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Universität zu Köln, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
This monograph is the first attempt at a comprehensive dynamic description of future tenses that have been attested in a whole language family, namely the Indo-European one. In general, future tenses are known as a non-obligatory feature of grammar which are repeatedly lost and acquired anew. Together with this, futures are particularly prone to variation, displaying a variety of additional (morpho)syntactic and functional properties. The authors intend to identify factors which trigger and/or facilitate the rise and subsequent evolution of different types of futures.
To this end, this investigation is sketched on the basis of the Indo-European language family, so that the rise and evolution of futures are comprehensively investigated in a range of languages with similar typological characteristics and of identical genealogical provenance. Their ultimate common ancestor did not have any dedicated future tense, and the different branches of this family embrace numerous closely related and therefore originally very similar languages spoken in Europe and Asia. The Indo-European language family is thus used a kind of natural laboratory, providing dynamic data on futures in diverging language systems.
ISBN 9783969392140 (Hardbound). LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics 58. 136pp. 2024.
