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As one of my annual obligations as editor, I am asked, on the occasion of the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in January, to file a report with the LSA Executive Committee in which I detail and discuss activities and issues pertaining to the running of the journal, highlight any new developments of note, and generally address any matters that either the Executive Committee or I myself consider to be important or noteworthy in some respect. Following what has become my usual procedure for fulfilling this obligation, I give below, in place of my more usual editorial comments in this section of the journal, my fourth ‘State of the Journal’ report, summing up the events of my fourth year on the job. The version given below is essentially the form in which the report was submitted to the Executive Committee in January, though I have taken the liberty of adding some informational updates in footnotes, correcting some errors, and embellishing and elaborating here and there as appropriate.
Taking stock. Nordlinger & Sadler 2004 (NS04) brought nominal tense/aspect/mood (TAM) markers across languages to the attention of the linguistic community and raised many important questions about noun-phrase temporality, lexical categories, and other research areas. In the theoretical literature on noun-phrase temporality, the idea that tense might be a category of noun phrases was considered as early as Enç 1981. In her analysis of the temporal interpretation of noun phrases, Enç (1981:41–45) briefly entertains the possibility of noun phrases being interpreted by nominal tense operators that locate the time relative to which a noun phrase is interpreted (i.e. Tonhauser 2007's (T07) noun-phrase time tnp) relative to the utterance time. Enç ultimately rejects the proposal since nominal tense operators ‘do not correspond to tense morphemes’ (1981:44), that is, do not have overt morphological counterparts, but also because an analysis according to which the noun-phrase time is contextually determined is more adequate. The primary focus of subsequent literature on noun-phrase temporality was to identify structural, semantic, and pragmatic constraints on the location of the noun-phrase time (e.g. Enç 1986, Musan 1995, 1999, Demirdache 1997, Tonhauser 2002). In the context of this research, the empirical domain of which is English, German, and St‘át'imcets, that is, languages that do not have nominal temporal markers, N&S's claim that there are languages with nominal tenses is exciting because these languages would provide overt evidence for Enç‘s nominal tense operators and promise insight into the way that the noun-phrase time is located.