GLOSS and the Department of Linguistics Colloquium
May 2nd, 3:00pm in Agate Hall
Doris L. Payne
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Where Does Aspect End and Clause Combining Begin - Past, Perfect, Perfective, Narrative, None or All
of the Above?
A number of assertions in the cannon on aspect characterize a classic “perfective” aspect grammatical
category as being tied to the discourse job of narrating bounded, discrete, sequential actions (Hopper
1979, Fleishman 1990). A classic “perfect” may have among its uses that of marking a transition to a
prior or anterior “mental space” (Comrie 1976; Fauconnier 1994). “Past tense” is a deictic category, and
typically indicates that the time of a situation was simply prior to the reference time of speaking.
Tucker & Mpaayei (1955) talk about Maa (Nilo-Saharan) as a tense language, and say that it has
“present”, “past”, “continuous”, and “narrative” tenses. König (1993) describes Maa as as an aspect
language, and renames Tucker & Mpayei’s so-called “past” as “perfective”.
This study agrees with König that Maa (like Nilotic generally) is an aspect language, but argues that the
textual profile of the so-called “perfective”/“past” typically marks transition to a different, usually prior,
mental or temporal space. It is thus is better characterized as a Perfect – and not as “perfective”.
Indeed, there is almost zero correlation between the relevant morphological form and the job of
narrating sequential actions.
Indeed, the narration of sequential actions co-occurs in many instances with what Tucker & Mpayei
called the “narrative tense” form, which is an n= connective proclitic on verbs. Thus, at first glance one
might be tempted to consider n= a perfective aspect marker. However, textual study shows that n= has
many functions and cannot be characterized as “perfective”. Indeed it is neither an aspect nor a tense
marker, but has a range of uses partially like English and, showing that propositions belong to the same
“mental space”.
Altogether, the distribution and use of the Maa Perfect and the Maa n= connective highlight the fuzzy
functional boundary between clause combining strategies, aspect, and communication of distinct
conceptual discourse “spaces”.
REFERENCES
Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fauconnier, Gilles. 1994. Mental spaces: Aspects of meaning construction in natural language. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Fleischman, S. 1990. Tense and narrativity: from medieval performance to modern fiction. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Hopper, Paul. 1979 Aspect and foregrounding in discourse. Syntax and Semantics, 12, 213–241.
König, Christa. 1993. Aspekt im Maa. Köln: Institüt für Afrikanistik, Universitat zu Köln.
Tucker, A. N. & J. Ole-Mpaayei. 1955. Maasai grammar, with vocabulary.
London: Longman, Green &Co.