Le langi et la Vallée du Rift Tanzanien (original) (raw)

On the verbal system in Langi a Bantu language of Tanzania (F. 33)

Computer Systems: Science & Engineering, 2005

This paper presents the Langi verbal system and the various ways in which tense, aspect and mood are encoded. Through the description of the structures and uses of the various forms, it attempts to demonstrate how the different conjugations fit together to form a coherent whole, morphologically and semantically, and how in some cases the system has been influenced by surrounding Cushitic languages. RESUME Cet article présente le système verbal du langi et les différents moyens mis en oeuvre pour encoder le temps, l'aspect et le mode. A travers la description des structures et emplois des diverses formes, il tente de démontrer comment les conjugaisons diverses forment un système cohérent, sur les plans morphologiques et sémantiques, et comment, dans certains cas, le système a été influencé par les langues couchitiques environnantes. * I thank the following for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper: Christiane Paulian, Zlatka Guentchéva, Denis Creissels, Dave Odden and an anonymous reviewer at SAL. I am also indebted to Derek Nurse and Maarten Mous for pointing out (as well as providing) various articles of interest for this study. 2 This language is relatively unknown to linguistics: when I began studying it in 1996, the only published work dated from 1916 (by Otto Dempwolff). The data presented here is all first hand, and was gathered during fieldwork I carried out in Tanzania during my doctoral studies, the funding for which was provided by the LACITO-CNRS. Oliver Stegen of SIL has started working on the language recently; so far he has presented a paper on the vowel system at CALL (Leiden) in 2000, and has published a paper on derivation (2002). A monograph on Langi is in press: Dunham (forthcoming).

Tense, Aspect and Mood in Mada, a Central-Chadic Language

Mada is a Central-Chadic language spoken in the Far-North Region of Cameroon. The language exhibits a number of interesting features, reflecting its Chadic roots, in the domain of Tense, Aspect and Mood (TAM). The present research presents a different take on the tone and TAM system of the language than what has been previously documented. There is no grammatical tense marking in Mada, but the language has a complex aspectual system built around the imperfective-perfective distinction.In addition to these primary aspects, Mada also has secondary and tertiary aspects marked by affixation. The modal system of the language is built around the dichotomy of realis-irrealis. Negation as well as speaker and agent-oriented modalities are subgroups of the irrealis. The different aspects and modalities interact with each other and their marking relies on grammatical tone and affixation resulting in a very complex verbal word. The findings of this research have implications for language development and have led to some concrete suggestions regarding the marking of grammatical tone in the orthography. MA thesis - University of Gloucestershire, UK 2016

Tense, Aspect and Mood in Nêlêmwa (New Caledonia): encoding events, processes and states

Aspectuality and Temporality. Descriptive and theoretical issues (Z. Guentcheva ed.), 2016

Nêlêmwa is an Aspect-Mood oriented language; verbs are unmarked for tense, time reference is expressed by chronology and time adverbs. Aspect hinges on three notions: events (in the aorist), states, and processes. One focus is the contrast between the perfect and the aorist. Bare aorist verb forms refer to events or to sequences of events with no reference to their internal phases. The perfect expresses internal relations between processes and clauses (anteriority, backgrounding, causal relations); it refers to transitional processes that have reached or not their final instant, expressing changes of states and resulting states. In future reference frames, the perfect expresses imminent change of states, or imminent completion of a process, and the speaker's certainty about their projected occurrence.

The verbal system in the Arbëresh dialect of

This work is an attempt to present a description of the verbal system of Arbëresh dialect spoken in Contessa Entellina, in Sicily. It focuses on the various ways in which person, tense, mood and aspect are encoded, on the salient features of the verbal derivation and verbal inflection. Through a description of the various forms, the author shows how a large number of verbs alternate between several stem. This study, that documents an endangered language, may constitute a starting point for further researche into the Arbëresh varieties.

Tense, aspect and mood in Nêlêmwa (New Caledonia)

Studies in Language Companion Series, 2016

Nêlêmwa is an Aspect-Mood oriented language; verbs are unmarked for tense, time reference is expressed by chronology and time adverbs. Aspect hinges on three notions: events (in the aorist), states, and processes. One focus is the contrast between the perfect and the aorist. Bare aorist verb forms refer to events or to sequences of events with no reference to their internal phases. The perfect expresses internal relations between processes and clauses (anteriority, backgrounding, causal relations); it refers to transitional processes that have reached or not their final instant, expressing changes of states and resulting states. In future reference frames, the perfect expresses imminent change of states, or imminent completion of a process, and the speaker's certainty about their projected occurrence.

Documentation and Description of Tense, Aspect and Mood in Gwama

2013

This thesis deals with the documentation and description of TAM (tense, aspect and mood) in Gwama, a Koman (Nilo-Saharan) language of southwestern Ethiopia. It has two parts. In the first part, after an introductory section on phonology and transcription, I survey first the pronouns, then the TAM categories, morphemes and constructions of the language. Since Gwama apparently is an aspect language, "tense" will not play any role in the thesis (thus "TAM" should really be "AM"). The different TAM categories are expressed formally by affixes, reduplication, and distinct series of pronouns. Much is still unclear, and the present description sometimes differs significantly from the two earlier sketch grammars. The second part of the thesis presents an analysis of digitally recorded and annotated texts as primary linguistic data, accompanied by the actual CD. ii Acknowledgments First of all I would like to thank my Almighty God for helping me along my way and in the successful completion of this work. Secondly, I would like to address my deepest gratitude to Professor Orin Gensler, the living Encyclopaedia of linguistics, for his experienced advising and wholehearted support. Dr. Anne-Christie Hellenthal, my former advisor, also deserves my gratitude for her invaluable advice, expertise and support, and for sharing all her work on Gwama with me. I would also like to thank SIL Ethiopia for covering most of my expenses during my field trips and for providing me with materials needed for this work. I would also like to extend my thanks to Andreas Joswig, Andreas Neudorf and Fikadu (SIL, Asosa) for facilitating my field trips. I am delighted to thank the cooperative and friendly young Gwama man, my primary language informant, Sadik' Habte, along with his people for their intelligent assistance and patience. I also thank my other informants

Towards a Reconsideration of the Tense-Aspect-Mood System of Tannaitic Hebrew

in Bar-Asher Siegal, Elitzur A. and Aaron Koller (editors), Studies in Mishnaic Hebrew and Related Fields Proceedings of the Yale Symposium on Mishnaic Hebrew May 2014, Jerusalem: The Academy of Hebrew Language, 2017, pp. 59-91

This paper provides an analysis of the Tense–Aspect–Mood system of Tannaitic Hebrew. Following an outline of the methodology in his choice of the corpus for this study, the author sketches out his analysis with a focus on the theoretical motivations in its favor.

Aspect and tense in Ethiosemitic languages

In this presentation, I argued that Ethiosemitic languages are primarily aspect-based but developed a secondary tense system. For this purpose, I first illustrated my conceptual understanding of tense/aspect with data from Amharic. In the second part, I discussed the situation for the remaining Ethiosemitic languages on more abstract comparative data.

Morph Syntactic Analysis of the use of Tense in Igikuria Language: A Minimalist Program

International Journal of Academic Research in Progressive Education and Development

Tense is marked in Igikuria verb. This research gives a general overview of tense. The Igikuria tense is looked into, which is divided into past and non-past. The past is further divided into immediate, recent and distant past. The non past is divided into the present and the future, and the distant future. The feature checking of the Minimalist Program will be shown to demonstrate how movement checks inflectional features for their correctness against their syntactic position in the constituency of a sentence. Key words: Tense, immediate past tense, recent past tense, distant past tense, present tense, future tense, distant future tense, movements. 1.0 Introduction Guthrie (1967:48) puts Igikuria in group 40 together with Ekegusii, Logooli(Kenya) Zamaki (Tanzania). Luhya(Kenya). Abakuria live both in Kenya and Tanzania. In Kenya they live in kuria district and in Tanzania they live in both Mara and Musoma districts. The homeland of the Abakuria is between river Migori to the east and Estuary of river Mara to the West. On the eastern side the area stretches from Migori district in South Nyanza in Kenya to Musoma district of Tanzania on the western side. To the south, the land borders the Transmara district on the Kenya side and Nguruma area in Tanzania. To the north is Lake Victoria. The immediate neighbors are the Abagusii, Maasai, Ngurumi.This paper is based on the Abakuria in Kenya who speak Igikuria language. Lyons (1968: 308) describes tense as 'relating the time of action, event or state of affairs referred to in sentence to the time of utterance'. According to Payne (1997: 236) tense is a grammatical expression of the relation of the time of an event to some reference point in time, usually the moment the clause is uttered. Lester (1971: 52) says 'every language can make the distinction between past, present and future time, but there is no obligation for the distinction to be carried solely by the inflection of the verb'. Givon (1984: 273) links tense to the time of performing the speech act as a reference point referred to as absolute tense, or some other point in time which is referred to as relative tense. It's also realized that adverbials can also mark tense even if they are not part of the verb affixation. According to Quirk (1983) tense is …"The correspondence between the form of a verb and our concept of time. This means that for one to know when an action took place, the word class that can answer this question is the verb only" Tense is what relates the time of action, event or

How the Neo-Assyrian Verb Works: Tense and Voice

Bēl Lišāni: papers in Akkadian Linguistics presented to John Huehnergard on the occasion of his retirement (Eisenbrauns Press)

The paper studies the expression of tense and voice in an Akkadian variety, Neo-Assyrian. The grammatical reading of a given verb form results from the interaction of the lexical meaning of the verb in question with the grammatical semantics of the morphological form used. Starting from this observation, the authors single out five verbal classes of Neo-Assyrian, related to the values of dynamicity and transitivity.

The tense-mood-aspect systems of the languages of Suriname

De Gruyter eBooks, 2017

The tense-mood-aspect systems of the languages of Suriname 313 to contact induced change than aspect, which is more susceptible than future tense, etc. A further hierarchy was also posited for modal categories. The < arrows indicate the direction of the implicational pattern in the data. (3) Matras (2007: 45-46) a. TMA: modality < aspect < future tense < other tenses b. modality (esp. MAT): obligation < necessity < possibility < ability < desire With this, Matras provides yet another possible hierarchy for the borrowability (and by implication, stability) of both forms and structures in the realm of TMA.

Future tense, prospective aspect, and irrealis mood as part of the situation perspective: Insights from Basque, Turkish, and Papuan

A morphological category whose primary function is to indicate future time reference is commonly called ‘future tense’. In descriptive practice, however, such morphological markers are often polysemous or multifunctional. I will provide a short typological overview of some of the problems involved, drawing examples from languages as different as Turkish, Basque, and the Papuan language Iatmul. The approach is first onomasiological: We single out the concept of future (tense/time) and look for its structural correlates in our language sample. The second step is semasiological, as we describe the polysemy and, where applicable, diachrony of the morphemes and constructions found through the onomasiological approach. In Turkish, we have two competing markers for the expression of future tense, which we may call ‘dispositive’ and ‘prospective’. Morphologically, they are both in the aspectual slot and therefore combine with present and past tense markers. The label ‘future tense’ is therefore problematic. Basque has a verbal morpheme -ke (glossable as potential or irrealis) appearing in a wide range of contexts having in common a certain distance from reality, such as future, epistemic assumption, conditional, or possibility/ability. In addition, Basque has an innovative periphrastic construction which is, like the Turkish markers, of aspectual origin and can combine with either present, past, or hypothetical ‘tense’. It is the latter, periphrastic construction, which has come to express future tense in most modern varieties of Basque, restricting -ke to its modal functions. Finally, the Papuan language Iatmul has a marker -kiya which not only covers future time reference, but also deontic modality and hypothetical statements. In addition, the language has innovative periphrastic constructions for a more determined future, which is a parallel to the Basque scenario. Interestingly, both Turkish and Iatmul have a reduced system in (some) subordinate clauses, which conflates the non-future/realis categories, but leaves the future/irrealis category intact. For linguistic theory, these observations invite two hypotheses. First, the tendency of future time markers to expand into the broad domain of irrealis makes them diachronically unsuitable for the expression of future events that are felt to have a closer connection with the reality of the speech situation, such as intentions. Second, the label ‘tense’ is often problematic for those markers of future time reference which are morphologically and/or semantically akin to aspectual and modal categories. A more adequate concept is therefore that of the situation perspective, which includes localization in time and with respect to reality. Tense, aspect, and mood should be seen as interacting prototypical categories within that macrocategory.

Tense and aspect systems in Dardic Languages - a comparative study

The languages belonging to the group commonly known as the “Dardic languages” are on some levels insufficiently researched and have barely been subject to any comparative research on their finer grammatical structures, such as their tense and aspect systems. This comparative study analyses three Dardic languages spoken in the central Dardic speaking area (Khowar, Gawri, Palula) in view of their tense and aspect system, to find out how similar the languages are in this respect. The comparison is based on Dahl‟s 1985 Tense and Aspect questionnaire, partly to have an equal, comparable data set, and partly to be able to tie the results to the greater field of language typology. The study shows that the languages studied have a common primary focus on IPFV:PFV distinction, where past tense often is a secondary implicature following perfective aspect. There are notable differences in how and if the languages mark future tense and habitual aspect. The subject merits further studies on an extended sample and with more languages from the Dardic group