Languages Without Tense

Within formal semantics, languages with no exponent of tense, or with optional tense, have begun to be incorporated into the theory of temporality only in the last couple decades. This article traces the development of their study, identifying empirical arguments that arbitrate between competing analyses of tenselessness. How future and past reference is established for root clauses, both in information-seeking exchanges and in narratives, requires differentiating at least three types of tenseless languages. Their temporal systems vary in whether they make use of a topic time, distinct from the eventuality and utterance times, and how they do so. While human language seems to allow for some variation in the temporal interpretation of tenseless clauses, it remains to be seen how constrained this variation is.