In Movima (isolate, Amazonian Bolivia), tense, aspect and mood are not marked on verbs, but encoded by particles. Tense is furthermore encoded by referential elements, in particular, articles. The Movima article indicates spatial and temporal properties of concrete entities; a three-way temporal distinction (nonpast, immediate past, more remote past) is made on noun phrases referring to times and events; noun phrases referring to absolute concepts are immune to temporal marking. While in principle, the article encodes the temporal properties of entities, by implicature it also determines the temporal interpretation of the clause as a whole, and it can even mark temporal reference in discourse directly. It is postulated that the article gradually grammaticalizes from an independent into a propositional nominal tense marker. The paper furthermore address some problems related to the concept of nominal tense marking.
