Speaker: Anastasia Tsilia (MIT)
Title: The future in desire: the case of Colloquial Jakartan Indonesian
Time: Wednesday, October 11th, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: Colloquial Jakartan Indonesian behaves like a tenseless language, with no tense morphology on the verb stem; the context disambiguates between a present and a past tense interpretation. As in many tenseless languages (Bochnak, 2019), the future is obligatorily marked by an adverb or akan/bakal will'. We argue that mauwant’ can be used to mark the future as well, as in the following:
(1) Context: We are at a party, but it’s getting late. I need to leave. Sebenarnya aku nggak mau, tapi aku mau pulang sekarang ya. Actually I neg want but I fut go-home now ok `I don’t actually want to but I will go home now.’
We call this use of mau the future mau. Future mau can have a purely temporal use, is compatible with inanimate subjects, and with the negation of mau meaning want' (also spelled out as pengen). However, future mau cannot be directly negated. It is incompatible with clausemate negation, negative quantifiers, and with the implicit negation triggered by the alternatives ofonly’ (Rooth, 1985). Yet, it is compatible with negation in a higher clause, as well as with negation in yes/no questions. It thus seems that we cannot negate future mau directly, but we can negate the proposition that contains it. We discuss the empirical picture, as well as argue that there is a dispositional requirement associated with future mau, namely a requirement that the subject is disposed to causing the eventuality of the verb. Finally, we propose that mau as a modal (Sneddon, 2010; Jeoung, 2020) is the dispositional will (Copley, 2002), having the meaning of bakal will' enriched with a presupposition about the dispositions of its subject. We also propose a solution to the negation puzzle, arguing that future mau behaves as a PPI, and following New (2023) in positing two adjunction sites for auxiliaries, one below and one above negP; being a PPI, future mau can only attach to the higher adjunction site. All in all, we show that mau in Indonesian can either quantify over buletic alternatives or simply over accessible worlds likewill’, with its desire' component being turned into a dispositional presupposition, eliminating the need for an attitude holder. Indonesian shows thatwant’ can synchronically mean `will’, a change which is diachronically attested in many languages (Heine, 2017).