Book published in 2007

Book published in 2007

The book attempts to provide a comprehensive description of the temporal elements and structures attested in the two major Dravidian languages – Tamil and Malayalam. As these two languages are closely related to each other, the work also envisages evolving a common strategy of identification and analysis with a view to register both theoretical and contrastive insights.

This study, of course, is the first of its kind for Tamil and Malayalam among the Indian Languages.  The objective of this study is to provide a semantic realization of the sentences involving the different tense forms in Tamil and Malayalam from the syntactico semantic point of view. The sentences of Tamil consisting of temporal elements have widely been compared with those of Malayalam.  The study prominently deals with the combination of tense and temporal adverbs and temporal dependency.

          An attempt has also been made to account for the compatibility and the non-compatibility of tense with certain verbs in sentences in which some nouns/pronouns function as subject/object.

While we are talking about morphology, the tense marker determines the time notion for the sentence; but not all the tense markers predict their own time, as far as the syntactic and semantic perspective is concerned.  In many cases, the temporal adverbs in the utterance are endorsed to presuppose the actual temporality in a sentence.

In some cases, one tense may be incompatible with certain syntactic components in the expressions.  Of course, the sentence may have three types of time – Speech Time, Event Time and Reference Time, as far as semantic analysis is concerned.  Paying attention to these time notions, in certain cases, the event time may be understood by tense form that occurs with the verb form.  In some other cases, it may be realized by the temporal adverbs.  As far as orientation time is concerned, there are two types of tenses – deictic and non-deictic tenses – found in almost all the languages all over the world.  In this way, various categories relating to temporality have been elaborately dealt with in this study. 

Temporal constructions are those which involve temporal elements. The manifestation of the notion of ‘temporality’ is typically effectuated by the tense system and/or the temporal adverb clause in sentences.  They may include the aspects relative to the temporality, modals, etc. The compatibility of the tense form and the temporal specifier involved in a sentence indicates not only the temporal properties but also the aspectual notions like habitual, incompleteness, etc.

Time, which is a universal semantic notion with three divisions – past, present and future – is distinctive from tense, which is grammatical category occurring with the verbal form.  In terms of semantic description, there are two kinds of tense systems in the languages, of which one is deictic (or relative to the speech time) and the other, non-deictic (or relative to the time other than the speech time).