Dogri to Konkani: a future-labelled form can describe repeated past intentions
Do not align tense names before reading the event
Dogri distinguishes tense and aspect in its verbal system, and its surface forms can carry several grammatical features together. When translating a Dogri account of earlier intentions into Konkani, the name of a target form is not enough to establish its time reference. Peterson and Mopkar document a restricted Standard Goan Konkani construction in which a future participle expresses past habitual meaning with predicates of promising, intending or thinking.
This is not a claim that Konkani future forms generally mean past. The authors identify a small class of predicates taking a complement about a subsequent event. In an original Dogri story about somebody repeatedly intending to attend a gathering, the repeated intention can belong to the past while attendance remains later than each intention. Those two times must be kept distinct.
A promise and its fulfilment have different timelines
A Dogri report that someone used to promise to return does not establish that the return happened. The main event is repeated promising; the embedded event is the proposed return. A Konkani rendering must preserve that separation. Choosing a future-looking target form need not relocate the promises to tomorrow if the documented past-habitual construction is involved, but the complement’s prospective meaning must not be mistaken for fulfilment.
Contrast an original scenario in which a visitor repeatedly promised to come back with one in which the visitor made a single promise yesterday. The study explicitly distinguishes the repeated construction from a nonhabitual past promise, which uses other past forms in its examples. Treating them as the same merely because both involve promising would lose repetition or add it to a one-time assurance.
The study’s limits matter for a Dogri narrative
The authors’ paraphrase discussion associates the future-participle construction with a continuing background disposition, rather than a simple foregrounded narrative event. Their proposed historical explanation remains an analysis, not a new rule that translators should impose on every sentence about thought. The documented variety is Standard Goan Konkani; the result should not be advertised as uniform across every Konkani variety.
For a Dogri narrative moving from a person’s repeated plans to what happened on one particular day, that distinction can be useful. The background tells the reader what the person kept intending; the later event advances the story. Preserve the transition instead of making all the clauses repeated states or all of them single completed events. The Dogri verb’s tense, accompanying frequency wording and surrounding sequence together establish the source interpretation. Evaluate the Konkani construction against that whole interpretation. A familiar grammatical label such as future cannot substitute for checking whether the target expresses a past habit, a present plan or a single promised action.
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