The expression of the grammatical category of tense in Colombian Sign Language

Abstract

This article presents the results of a recent research which aims to analyze, from a descriptive perspective, a punctual aspect of the Colombian Sign Language’s grammar that has not been systematically explored, as many other morphosyntactic issues: the formal strategies for the grammatical expression of tense. The analysis is based on data collected in 2013 and in 2019 from five deaf signers in Medellín. Strategies for tense expression in spoken (oral) languages (like the ones reported in Comrie, 1985) and in other sign languages (see for example Baker, Van den Bogaerde, Pfau & Schermer, 2016) are considered contrastively. The analysis took two basic semantic components of the tense notion into account: the orientation and the distance of the reported events in relation to a reference point or deictic center, and, more specifically, the following aspects: the signer’s body as the temporal reference point, adverbial tense markers, morphological strategies, syntactic order of tense markers in simple sentences, temporal neutralization, present as the unmarked tense, and indirect temporal orientation.