|
Home page List of proceedings Info for readers Info for authors Info for editors Info for libraries Order form Shopping cart |
Selected Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference on African Linguistics edited by Doris L. Payne and Jaime Peña ISBN 978-1-57473-420-1 library binding v + 203 pages publication date: 2007 published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA Table of contents Abstract Derek Nurse The Emergence of Tense in Early Bantu 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. |