Reduction in remoteness distinctions and reconfiguration in the Bemba past tense (original) (raw)
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Comparative Tense and Aspect in the Mara Bantu Languages: towards a Linguistic History
2013
The Mara region of Tanzania is a densely populated area that contains at least 22 Bantu speech varieties in addition to the Nilotic languages Luo and Taturu (Hill et al. 2007; Mitterhofer & Robinson 2012). In Maho’s updated version of Guthrie’s geographically influenced classification system, the Bantu speech varieties of the region are divided into the JE25 and JE40 groups (Maho 2009). To a large degree this classification corresponds with the proposed genetic linguistic sub-groups of “Mara” (most of JE40) and “Suguti” (JE25), which are purportedly related to each other under the East Nyanza branch of Great Lakes (GL) Bantu based on lexical similarity in core vocabulary, shared lexical innovation/borrowing, and insight from other scientific fields like archaeology and palynology (Schoenbrun 1990). Additionally, Schoenbrun’s (1990) study on GL Bantu further subdivides “Mara” into North Mara and South Mara groups. More recent studies interested in comparative linguistics amongst the ...
2016
Isu, along with the other West Ring languages of the Grassfields Bantu group in Cameroon, presents a highly elaborate tense system which differentiates three degrees of synthetically marked pasts and two distinct futures, thus ranging in the upper field of morphological complexity cross-linguistically, as established by Dahl & Velupillai 2005 and de Haan 2013. Apart from the morphological proliferation of tense contrasts which are conceptually based on the daily cycle and the less specific division of immediacy vs. remoteness (Bybee, Perkins & Pagliuca 1994: 98, de Haan 2013: 448f.), crucial complexities of the Isu tense system reside in the conflation of purely temporal notions with non-temporal notions such as aspectual focus, evidentiality and offensiveness, i.e. at least two reduced temporal subsystems – offensive pasts and past perfective focus – are superimposed to the basic tense system. Apart from the semantic interest, there is also a morphophonological, or rather morphoton...
2018
This article aims to give a semantic study of the reflexes of one specific tense/aspect form, namely the so-called *-a-B-a construction, in a cluster of about 40-odd Kikongo language varieties spoken in a wide area around the mouth of the Congo River in Central Africa. We first present a detailed analysis of the multiple uses of these cognate constructions at sentence level, in order to arrive at a formal and semantic reconstruction for the most recent common ancestor of the Kikongo Language Cluster, namely Proto-Kikongo. The analysis departs from the overall aspectual meaning of the linguistic expression in which the tense-aspect construction is used. Therefore, we also take into consideration the contribution of different aspectual tiers, such as lexical and grammatical aspect, adverbials and taxis constructions. Through the discussion of the multiple uses of the-a-B-a construction, we argue that its overall meaning is complex, combining both temporal and aspectual semantics. It is furthermore shown that a lexical-aspect distinction between states-of-affairs with transitional versus non-transitional temporal structure is crucial in order to understand the various uses of the-a-B-a construction. Methodologically, the formal and semantic reconstruction to Proto-Kikongo are based on a thorough comparison of a multitude of existing data sources, some of which several centuries old, as well as original fieldwork. This bottom-up approach has rarely been pursued over the past half century in Bantu grammatical reconstructions.
Afrikanistik und Ägyptologie Online, 2016
In this paper, two verbal configurations in Nyakyusa, a Bantu language of southern Tanzania (Guthrie-Code M31), are discussed with regard their synchronic meaning and use and their diachronic origins. The first configuration constitutes a dedicated narrative paradigm whose shape lɪnkʊ-...-FV resembles a present progressive or simple present widespread across Bantu (Bastin 1989a, 1989b). Based on Haspelmath (1998), it is argued that the specialization of this construction to narrative discourse is a side-effect of the advanced grammaticalization of a new present tense construction marked by a prefix (i)kʊ-…-FV. The second configuration in question features the prefix of this new present plus a general imperfective suffix -aga, yielding a non-compositional future-oriented modal meaning. Drawing on data from languages of the wider area and on findings from formal semantics (e.g. Krifka et al. 1995), it is argued that the present-day function of this second construction goes back to the restriction of the ambiguous simple present to a habitual/generic reading plus the semanticization of a future-oriented implicature.