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Derek Nurse
164-179 (complete pdf)
This paper examines the expression of aspect and tense in a selection of Bantu and non-Bantu Niger-Congo languages. Both sets of languages share a set of aspects. All Bantu languages also have a set of tenses (of varying size), superimposed on the inherited aspectual base, and the paper concludes that the emergence of tense was an innovation in pre- or Proto-Bantu. Grammaticalisation research over the last years has shown that individual aspects become tenses (and not usually vice versa). This paper proposes that a whole aspect-based system has added a tense component.
Published in:
Selected Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference on African Linguistics
edited by Doris L. Payne and Jaime Peña
Table of contents
ISBN 978-1-57473-420-1 library binding
v + 203 pages
publication date: 2007
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA