Paraguayan Guarani does not overtly mark tense in its inflectional system. Prior accounts of languages without obligatory morphological tense have posited a phonologically covert lexical tense, or have introduced tense semantics via a rule, in the post-syntactic interpretative component. We offer a more radical approach: Paraguayan Guarani does not have tense at the level of lexical or logical semantics. We propose that evaluation time shift, a mechanism independently attested in the narrative present in languages with tense, is more widely used in Paraguayan Guarani for encoding temporal meaning. The broader consequence of our proposal is that tense is not a linguistic universal.

巴拉圭瓜拉尼语在其屈折系统中并没有明显地标记时态。先前对没有强制性形态时态的语言的描述已经在后句法解释成分中提出了语音上隐蔽的词汇时态，或者通过规则引入了时态语义。我们提供了一种更激进的方法：巴拉圭瓜拉尼语在词汇或逻辑语义层面上没有时态。我们提出，评估时移是一种在时态语言的叙事中独立证明的机制，在巴拉圭瓜拉尼语中更广泛地用于编码时间意义。我们建议的更广泛的结果是时态不是语言的普遍性。