An Experimental Approach To Nominal Tense: Evidence From Pomak (Slavic)

This article presents the first experimental evidence on nominal tense. Data are from Pomak, a Slavic variety that makes use of a deictic suffix for referents in the interlocutor's sphere and for past-modal reference. Forty L1-Pomak participants completed an acceptability judgment task (in Pomak) and two reaction-time experiments using auditory stimuli (in L1 Pomak and in L2 Greek). In the Pomak reaction-time experiment, in particular, participants listened to NPs with temporal reference marked either purely grammatically, with a deictic suffix, or grammatically and semantically/pragmatically. As predicted, responses were accurate and fast in grammatical-only items even though success rates improved for nominals that had additional semantic and pragmatic temporal reference. To conclude, our study confirms that Pomak deictic suffixes provide temporal information at the level of the NP and introduces a method that could be used to test the existence of nominal tense in other languages.