Aspectualized futures in Indonesian and English

Indonesian has three morphemes that are commonly used to express futurity : akan, mau, and pasti. In this paper, I consider the grammaticality and felicity judgments of two Indonesian speakers from Jakarta for whom these future morphemes all have different meanings. That is, it seems that for these speakers, no two of these morphemes are merely stylistic or register variants of each other. I will argue that for these speakers, the meanings of these three morphemes all contain a future modal, and that two of them (mau and pasti) each additionally include a different aspectual operator (progressive-like and generic-like respectively) affecting the temporal argument of the accessibility relation of the modal. These combinations of aspect and a future modal I call "aspectualized futures." Throughout, I will compare the Indonesian future forms with those in English : will and be going to).

À lire dans la même rubrique :

• The Plan’s the Thing : Deconstructing Futurate Meanings
• The Semantics of the Future
• Temporal Orientation in Conditionals
• O’odham cem : When the Actual World Isn’t Inertial
• Ordering and reasoning