Syntactic Tense from a Comparative Syntax Perspective

Lin (2010) argues that an analysis without a Tense category for Chinese can better explain four syntactic properties of the language than an analysis with it: (a) no copula verb, (b) no expletive subject, (c) possibly no finite vs. nonfinite distinction, and (d) possibly no case-driven A-movement. In this article, we consider data from a variety of languages as well as some Chinese data that Lin does not take into account. We show that there is no principled reason for relating these four properties to syntactic Tense.