Tense as an ‘Altaic’ feature in Northern Sinitic?

Sinitic languages are very often described as ‘tenseless’, since they are mostly seen as lacking grammatical markers of tense. However, the debate concerning the tenseless nature of Sinitic has not settled yet: several types of items (modal and aspectual particles, verbs, etc.) have actually been analyzed as expressing both aspect and tense, tense and modality, or even tense only. In this paper, we would like to critically evaluate the role that contact with non-Sinitic (‘Altaic’) languages may have had in the grammaticalization of grammatical tense markers in Sinitic. Based on a survey of the proposals concerning the presence vs. absence of tense as a grammatical category in Sinitic languages, we shall argue that, just as as for many other defining features of the East and Mainland Southeast Asian Area, the prominence of aspect and the general indeterminatedness of utterances appear to be somewhat less evident in (part of) Northern China than in Southern China. We shall assess the claims that contact favoured the development of tense in different Sinitic varieties: while this is very likely to be true for future markers in the Qinghai-Gansu region and perhaps in some other Northern Sinitic varieties, other tense (proto-)systems seem to be mostly explained by internal developments. We shall also discuss the reasons behind the apparent asymmetry between future/nonpast and past tense markers in this respect, exploring the role of the Mongolic languages of China in the establishment of mixed aspect-tense systems based on the past vs. nonpast opposition.