Nouns Marked in Funny Places in Clause Structure

The idea is that independent words have become clitics and have gotten smacked on in funny places. I was inclined to think about the tense not so much as nouns are taking tense because the nouns aren't taking tense. The way I look at it is sort of like, say, if you're talking about in the past tense and you mark, say the object or the subject fairy in past tense, what you're saying is a fairy that existed at some point in the past was doing this. And it may be that that fairy still exists, but that's kind of the way I approach it.