From verbal morphology to the syntactic structure: Bole and Hausa (Chadic) tense/aspect system(s)

Leszek Barczak

University of British Columbia

In so far, linguistic investigations of Chadic languages have been focusing on the typological and historical classification of the latter. This, in turn, led to a certain amount of publications (purely descriptive in most cases) exposing the surface structures of such languages and grammatical rules through which they are derived. Little, if any, work has been done in terms of analysing Chadic languages as multi-level systems of which the external structures are instantiations/variations of a single structure of the more abstract phenomenon known as the Human Language.

In this paper, I look at earlier works on Bole and Hausa (both from the Chadic family) and related to their verbal morphology as well as to the temporal/aspectual meaning of the particular verb forms in search of a single syntactic structure of tense and aspect which would not only account for but also explain forms found in both languages despite of superficial differences due to the fact that Hausa is an analytic system and Bole is a more synthetic one.

First, based on the data found in Gimba (2000), Newman (2000) and Pawlak (1998) (see (1) and (2) below, for examples), I look at the verbal affixes and auxiliaries found in Bole and Hausa respectively and the temporal/aspectual meaning they carry. Second, I look at the distribution and ordering of such affixes/auxiliaries within the verb complex as well as the restrictions on their co-occurrence.

Further, following the general theoretical assumption of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995) as well as those related specifically to tense/aspect found in works by Stowell (1993, 1995 and 1998), Zagona (1990) as well as Demirdache and Uribe-Etxebarria (1998) amongst others, I propose a single syntactic structure for both languages and argue that the surface variations are not due to the difference in structure, but rather to the fact that the verb movement from V-to-Infl. position is characteristic of and overt in Bole, but not found in Hausa (or happens covertly).

Finally, I consider the proposed structure in light of the general pattern emerging from Cinque’s (1995) work ( [_IP…[Mood [Mod [Tense [Aspect [VP]]]]]…] ) and state what are the implications of my observations for the current linguistic theory – especially for the hypothesis of the structural invariance of languages.

References:

Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Cinque, Guglielmo. 1995. Adverbs and functional heads: a cross-linguistic perspective. Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax. Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press.

Demirdache, Hamida and Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria. 1998. " On the Projection of Temporal Structure in Natural Languages." In R. Martin, D. Michaels and J. Uriagerreka (eds.), Step by Step: Essays on Minimalist Syntax in Honor of Howard Lasnik. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Enç, Mürvet. 1987. Anchoring Conditions for Tense. Linguistic Inquiery 18.

Gimba, Alhaji Maina. 2000. Bole verb morphology. Ph.D. dissertation (UCLA).

Hornstein, Norbert. 1990. As time goes by: Tense and Universal Grammar. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Leder, H. 1991. Tense and Temporal Order. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.

Newman, Paul. 2000. The Hausa Language: An Encyclopaedic Reference Grammar. Yale Language Series. NewHeaven & London: Yale University Press.

Pawlak, Nina. 1998. Język Hausa. Języki Azji i Afryki – Series. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo DIALOG.

Smith, C. 1991. The Parameter of Aspect. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press.

Stowell, Tim. 1993. The syntax of Tense. Ms, UCLA.

Stowell, Tim. 1995. The phrase structure of Tense. In J. Rooryck and L. Zaring, eds., Phrase Structure and the Lexicon. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Stowell, Tim. 1998. Perfect Tense. Ms, UCLA.

Zagona, Karen. 1990. Times as temporal argument structure. Unpublished manuscript: University of Washington.

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