Abstract
Temporal/aspectual morphology often serves as a diagnostic for actional classes. Bantu languages are known for their highly developed tense, aspect (and mood) systems. The East Ruvu Bantu languages of Tanzania are unusual in that they exhibit a decidedly reduced set of temporal/aspectual morphemes. This paper contributes to the growing body of research on Bantu actionality in showing that despite not being encoded overtly, perfective distinguishes between at least two actional classes. We suggest, however, that imperfective, morphologically encoded by present and non-past tense morphology, does not clearly delineate between the two verb classes. This discussion highlights the complex interaction between tense and aspect.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 533-559 |
| Number of pages | 27 |
| Journal | STUF - Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung |
| Volume | 74 |
| Issue number | 3-4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2021 |
Funding
Acknowledgments: We are grateful to Thera Crane, Johanna Nichols and Bastian Persohn for organizing the session “A cross-linguistic perspective on the role of the lexicon in actionality” at the 13th Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT), and for editing this special issue. We also wish to thank the audience at ALT and two anonymous reviewers for invaluable feedback. Finally, our deep appreciation goes to the speakers of East Ruvu Bantu languages, without whom this work would not be possible. Research funding: The study was supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (P15-0341:1).
| Funder number |
|---|
| P15-0341:1 |
Keywords
- Eastern Bantu languages
- actionality
- imperfective
- perfective
- tense
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