The behaviour of the Bantu morpheme -ag- in Greater East Ruvu

The morpheme *-ag/ang- (and its various realizations) is found across the Bantu
language family and is most often associated with imperfective meanings. This paper describes the behaviour of -ag- in six Greater East Ruvu (GER) Bantu languages spoken in the Morogoro region of Tanzania: Kagulu, Kami, Kutu, Kwere, Luguru and Zalamo. While -ag- shows evidence of both progressive and habitual interpretations in these languages, -ag- is not obligatory. Rather, -ag- is more commonly used for habitual meanings in GER languages today. We suggest that this narrowing of the meaning of -ag- from imperfective to habitual may be a result of two factors: (i) the lack of a grammaticalized habitual construction in GER languages, and (ii) the loss of the perfective morpheme -ile in ER languages. This development of -ag- confirms Nurse’s (2008: 144) suggestion that there is a “cognitive connection between imperfective and habitual, excluding progressive”. That -ag- is not obligatory in GER languages is consistent with features of the GER temporal/aspectual systems which lack much of the tense and aspect morphology typical across Bantu languages. However, the non-obligatoriness of -ag- in imperfective contexts suggests that the GER temporal/aspectual systems are continuing to evolve.