On the universality of the Tense Phrase Hypothesis: Evidence from Lesotho

Abstract

There has been a protracted debate about the universality of tense. In the lens of generative grammar, tense is considered a core functional category of a clause that marks the time of the action expressed by a verb. Tense is known for its function of licensing the grammatical subject role and, as such, it pertains to the specifier position, reflecting the grammatical subject-relation. As a result, within the Minimalist Program, clauses are said to be tense phrases, following the Tense Phrase Hypothesis, which states that all clauses, regardless of finiteness, are tense phrases. While this claim might hold for inflectional languages, it can be countered by the data from Sesotho, a vehicular cross-border Bantu language spoken in Lesotho, South Africa and Zimbabwe. In terms of Guthrie’s classification (1967–1971), Sesotho belongs to S33. Therefore, the main argument in this article is that a Tense Phrase Hypothesis may be universal, but its realisation is language specific, as suggested by the data from Sesotho. This means that, unlike inflectional languages, such as English, which do not separate tense phrases into agreement or number, agglutinative languages, such as Sesotho, with rich morphology expressed in a complex agreement system, exhibit splitting into tense or number.