The earliest paper in this section begins with the puzzle that the finite negative sentence in Kannada instantiates a matrix gerund or a matrix infinitive, and that these seemingly nonfinite clauses have tense interpretations. The central proposal is that a syntactic Tense projection, standardly understood to constitute finiteness, cannot constitute finiteness in the Kannada clause; nor is tense interpretation confined to what is standardly understood to be tense morphology. Finiteness in this language is constituted by the Mood Phrase; agreement on the verb is a reflex of indicative mood. (This last point accords with a traditional claim, ever since Caldwell (1856), that subject-verb agreement constitutes finiteness in Dravidian.) This argument is extended to Malayalam (which has no overt agreement), even though Malayalam superficially has no problem about its negative sentences: its negative sentences have the same “tense” morphemes that appear in its affirmative sentences. The last paper on this topic seeks to explain the seemingly “regular” negative clause in Malayalam, as well as the differences between the Dravidian languages in whether the negative clause has a tense interpretation at all, in terms of the positive polarity properties of verbs in paradigms that express overt agreement.
Our proposal that Dravidian has no Tense has obvious implications for the cartographic claims about the universal functional sequence of the clause (Cinque 1999), and finds its place in the current debate about clausal anchoring, and the representations of finiteness and tense in languages, see (among others) Ritter & Wiltschko (2005, 2009). The question of nominative case assignment in the absence of Tense remains to be addressed; see Sundaresan and McFadden (2010), and McFadden and Sundaresan (2014) for further discussion of finiteness.
For an appreciation of the traditional positions about Tense, Agreement, Finiteness, and related questions among the Dravidianists, the best source is Steever (1988). (The reader may also wish to see a critique of these positions in Jayaseelan (1991).)
Caldwell, R. 1856. A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages. Reprinted 1974: Munshiram Manoharlal, Delhi.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and Functional Heads: a cross-linguistic perspective. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Jayaseelan, K. A. 1991. Review of Sanford Steever, The Serial Verb Formation in the Dravidian Languages (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1988), Linguistics 29: 543–549.
McFadden, T., and S. Sundaresan. 2014. Finiteness in South Asian languages: an introduction. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 32: 1–28.
Ritter, Elizabeth, and Martina Wiltschko. 2005. Anchoring events to utterances without tense. In Proceedingsof the 24th West coast conference on formal linguistics, eds. John Alderete et al., 343–351. Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. www.lingref.com, document #1240. Accessed 10 July 2013.
Ritter, Elizabeth, and Martina Wiltschko. 2009. Varieties of infl: Tense, location, and person. In Alternatives to cartography, ed. Jeroen van Craenenbroeck. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/000780/current.pdf. 31 August 2013.
Steever, Sanford B. 1988. The Serial Verb Formation in the Dravidian Languages, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi.
Sundaresan, S., and T. McFadden. 2009. DP distribution and finiteness in Tamil and other languages: selection vs. Case. Journal of South Asian Linguistics 2:5–34.