b. 冀(51a)冁g,c⳱ w᭚e[walk(e)(w) & agent(Mary)(e)(w) & (e) ⊆ g(i)]
(where no part of g(i) follows tc)
c. There is an event e of Mary walking, whose running time (e) is included in the contextually salient nonfuture time g(i).
(Matthewson 2006:680)
According to Matthewson (2006:681), (51c) predicts that (50) can be interpreted in the past or in the present, depending upon whether the discourse has a past reference time or a present reference time. On this analysis, the only difference between English and St’a´t’imcets is that the TENSE morpheme in the latter is slightly less restrictive than English PAST.
The greatest difficulty with Matthewson’s analysis is the incompatibility between the mean-ing of perfective aspect and the present interpretation. Followmean-ing Bar-el’s (2005) study of Skwxwu´7mesh, a Central (Coast) Salish language, Matthewson assumes that absence of an overt imperfective marker in St’a´t’imcets indicates perfective aspect, which is an inclusion relation of the event time within the reference time. However, normally the inclusion relation under discussion is understood in such a way that the whole maximal event including the initial and final endpoints is included within the reference time (see Klein 1994, Kratzer 1998). This means that any entire event denoted by a superficially tenseless sentence in St’a´t’imcets must fall within an interval whose final endpoint is no later than the speech time. In other words, St’a´t’imcets shouldn’t allow a superficially tenseless sentence to be interpreted in such a way that the running time of the event extends beyond the speech time. This prediction, however, contradicts the present interpretation of the sentences in (48). This problem implies either that the null tense analysis proposed by Mat-thewson is still inadequate or that her assumption regarding perfective aspect needs to be revised.
If these observations are correct, then even the most detailed tensed analysis of a (superfi-cially) tenseless language in the literature hasn’t been completely successful.
6 Concluding Remarks
This article has shown that Sybesma’s (2007) arguments for the existence of a syntactic T node in Chinese still leave room for reconsideration. His evidence does not force us to conclude that Chinese must have a T node. In fact, it was shown that a tensed analysis of Chinese overgenerates unwanted readings. On the other hand, the tenseless alternative presented here accounts for the same range of data without encountering the same problems. This tenseless analysis is further supported by syntactic evidence such as the ability of a nominal predicate to serve as the main predicate, the impossibility of expletive subjects, the lack of a clear distinction between finite and nonfinite clauses, and the possible absence of case-related movement.
In addition to the above conclusions, it is worth emphasizing that functional categories may vary from language to language; it is not necessarily true that all languages share the same set of functional categories. It is under this assumption that a tenseless analysis of Chinese should be preferred to a tensed analysis not only because of syntactic economy but also because of Occam’s razor, as my earlier works (Lin 2003b, 2006) have suggested. Of course, by this short reply, I dare not hope to have settled the debate over tensed and tenseless analyses of Chinese.
However, I believe that the discussion and the empirical facts reported here have made a significant contribution to this debate.
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