Nominal Tense with Nominal Scope: A Preliminary Sketch

The morphosyntactic categories of tense, aspect and mood are traditionally considered to be properties of verbs. However, the morphological expression of these categories within the nominal system is attested across a range of languages. Drawing on data from a number of languages, we provide a preliminary sketch of the phenomenon of nominal tense with nominal scope - that is, cases in which nominal tense serves to temporally locate the nominal independent of the temporal specification of a governing predicate.