tense and aspect in bantu aug 2008

[...]... interlocking nature of the systems in Bantu languages can be seen clearly in the matrices in the Appendices In these systems, tense may combine with aspect, and aspect with aspect (1.4.7), but tense does not co-occur with tense in a single word form (see 1.4.6) As the preceding section points out, the Bantu verb encodes other categories, which also form part of the overall interlocking verbal system: mood, negatives,... tenses and aspects are, how tenses and aspects interact, their semantic content, something of their pragmatics, how they are expressed morphologically, and inevitably with the general structure of the verb in Bantu Then I realized that to deal only with TA was to ignore other important features of the Bantu verb, other categories expressed by the verb While other authors had 2 Tense and Aspect in Bantu. .. arbitrary, and it is not clear if or how the languages chosen are typical This book was initially intended solely as a belated response to that question, how tense and aspect ‘work’ in Bantu languages To paraphrase Comrie (1985: viii), the main area of concentration in this book is the typology of tense and aspect (henceforth TA) in Bantu, the establishment of the range within which Bantu languages vary in. .. grammaticalize aspectual distinctions in their in ection Aspect may not always be marked Thus, although unmarked for aspect, the forms in (1a) are obviously distinct from those in (1b) The forms in (1b) represent an event in progress, while those in (1a) often represent a complete event Similarly in most matrices in the Appendices, the forms in the left-hand column are unmarked for aspect (perfective)... 1s-PAST -aspect1 -aspect2 -aspect3 -stem ‘I also used to till’ or tense before the stem, and aspect after, as in (4) Gikuyu (E51) tw-a-hanyok-aga 1p-P3 -run-IPFV ‘We were running’ or tense is in the auxiliary and aspect in the lexical verb, as in Introduction (5) Swahili (G42) 15 tu-li-kuwa tu-ki-kimbia 1p-PAST-be 1p-PAR-run ‘We were running’ Exceptionally, separation of functions can go even further, as in. .. East African languages, and almost nothing about verbs in all the other hundreds of Bantu languages spoken in east, south, central, and west central Africa I realized that most other Bantuists and linguists were and are in much the same situation Many linguists know or suspect that some Bantu languages have a rich set of grammaticalized tense- aspect categories but the details and the limits of the set... 14 Tense and Aspect in Bantu 1.4.6 Any given (single) verb form can only have one tense If tense is defined as the representation of location in time, then it follows that any single verb form can only have one tense, because an event can only be located at one time In the English example in (1), we see that, no matter how many words are contained in the verbal piece, there is only one mark of tense, ... Contents 7.2.1 The original Niger-Congo aspect system added tense in Bantu 7.2.2 The original Niger-Congo analytic structure became synthetic in Bantu 7.2.3 SVO > SOV 7.3 Grammatical change 7.3.1 New aspectual suffixal in ection in Bantu 7.3.2 Compensation for phonological and morphological attrition in the northwest 7.3.3 Independent (non-verbal) item > clitic > affix (> TA) 7.3.4 Independent non-verbal... future) hortative human hypothetical IMM IMP INAN IND INCE INCH INF INFL INT IO IPFV IRR ITR immediate (future or past) imperative inanimate indicative inceptive inchoative in nitive in ection intentive indirect object imperfective irrealis iterative JUS jussive L LIM LOC low tone(d) (or Zone L, as above) limitative locative Abbreviations xvii M MET MB MOD mood or, in Appendices, metatony metatony modified... The categories themselves tend to be relatively stable over time, and they tend to re-occur across languages One of the purposes of this book is to seek out and highlight these recurring categories in Bantu 1.4.3 Tense and aspect form an interlocking system This is implied in, and represented by, the presentation in 1.4.1 and the matrices in the Appendices This has practical beside theoretical value, . immediate (future or past) IMP imperative INAN inanimate IND indicative INCE inceptive INCH inchoative INF in nitive INFL in ection INT intentive IO indirect object IPFV imperfective IRR irrealis ITR. categories in Bantu 28 2.1 Bantu languages are agglutinating 28 2.2 Linear verb structure in Bantu 28 2.2.1 Singular imperatives 28 2.2.2 In ected single words 29 2.2.3 Two-word structures, consisting. 10 1.4.1 Tense and aspect form a system 11 1.4.2 Tense and aspect systems are cognitively based, not direct representations of events in the real world 12 1.4.3 Tense and aspect form an interlocking