Perfectivity and time reference in Hausa

Mahamane L. Abdoulaye (1)

1 UAM - Abdou Moumouni University of Niamey = Université Abdou Moumouni de Niamey

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 lookàcin dà '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.

Mots clés: Hausa; grammaticalization; perfective; tense; aspect

Domaines: Linguistique

Mahamane L. Abdoulaye. Perfectivity and time reference in Hausa. 2007. ⟨hal-00192760⟩