When is a temporal marker not a tense? Reply to Tonhauser 2007

<jats:p> In her recent <jats:italic>Language</jats:italic> paper, Tonhauser (2007, henceforth T07) provides a comprehensive in-depth discussion of the semantics of two nominal temporal markers occurring in Paraguayan Guaraní, based on her fieldwork study and subsequent Ph.D. T explicitly situates her article as arguing against the claims of our <jats:italic>Language</jats:italic> article (Nordlinger &amp; Sadler 2004, henceforth NS04), which presents a crosslinguistic study of the inflectional categories of tense, aspect, and mood on nominal categories, and classified Guaraní as having nominal tense markers. T argues that while the Guaraní nominal markers can be shown to ‘affect the temporal interpretation of the noun phrase they attach to’ (p. 831), they are not in fact markers of nominal tense. </jats:p>