NOMINAL TENSE IN TIKUNA

In the Tikuna language, the tripartite paradigm of feminine, masculine, and past is a highly grammaticalized and concordant nominal class paradigm, which inevitably expresses itself in a series of grammatical contexts. The fusion of the gender and tense paradigms is a relatively original feature of Tikuna. As opposed to what occurs in languages that also have markers for the future nominal tense or the remote past tense, here nominals only express the categories of 'past' and 'not past'. Typologically, Tikuna would belong to the group in which the nominal tense has a propositional scope. Furthermore, these nominal categories extend to some discursive connectors, which is also a partially original feature of this language. The presence of these forms, with tense and modality values, can be widely observed in the narrative genre.