Temporal reference from a radical pragmatics perspective: Why Yucatec does not need to express ‘after’ and ‘before’

According to Wierzbicka's natural semantic metalanguage approach, t he event-ordering relations “after” and “before” represent primitives and universal s oftime semantics. The paper offers evidence against this proposal. The argumentation is based on Yucatec Afaya, a language in which eventorder relations are not grammaticalized (no deictic or anaphoric tenses) and are only marginally lexicalized (no connectives or adverbiah such as after(wards) or befor Time reference and temporal coherence in discourse rely crucially on modal and aspectual operators. Inferences about temporal ordering derived from modal and aspectual Information depend on context and worid knowledge. However, the results of a film-to-film matching task prove clearly that native Speakers of Yucatec and German do not differ in their capability to identify, categorize and communicate the complex temporal structures represented in the Videos. Finally, a discussion of Yucatect aspectual verbs reveals semantic properties distinct from those of Indo-European aspectual verbs and points to the greater power of Yucatec aspectual operators in maintaining discourse coherence.