Perfectivity and time reference in Hausa

Bibliographic Data

ID19523049
AuthorsMahamane L Abdoulaye (corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume6
Issue1
Publication date2008-01-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLinguistic Discovery (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1537-0852 • E-ISSN: 1537-0852
PublisherDartmouth College Library Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1349/ps1.1537-0852.a.330
OpenAlexW2001835086
LanguageEN
References cited14

The relative marking in Hausa marks discourse presupposition in perfective and imperfective relative clauses and out-of-focus clauses of focus and fronted wh-questions. However, the Relative Perfective also appears in storyline narrative clauses and various accounts try to find a common feature between relative clauses and narrative context. This paper rejects the common feature approach to Hausa relative marking and presents a systematic grammaticalization account of the functions of the Relative Perfective. The paper shows that in temporal when relative clauses headed by lookcin d 'time that', the aspectual contrast Relative Imperfective vs. Relative Perfective has vanished, and the Relative Perfective indexes the specific time of the event. The temporal relative clauses differ from locative and manner adverbial relative clauses, whose semantics (location and manner) are not usual inflectional categories and they therefore maintain the aspectual contrast between Relative Perfective and Relative Imperfective. The paper shows that the new temporal category, the Specific Time Marker, spread to other environments and incorporated a time orientation feature in main clauses of narrative and dialogical discourse to become a simple past. The paper proposes a mixed tense and aspect TAM system for Hausa, a system positioned between aspect-only and tense-prominent systems

Hausa · Linguistics · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Philosophy