Tense, aspect and manner encoding in Ikaan beyond verbal inflection

Main author: Salffner, Sophie
Format: Book Chapters           
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id eprints-12437
recordtype eprints
institution SOAS, University of London
collection SOAS Research Online
language English
English
language_search English
English
topic P Philology. Linguistics
PL Languages and literatures of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania
description This paper reports on aspects of the verbal morphology of Ikaan, an endangered minority language spoken in Nigeria. In addition to regular and obligatory tense-aspect-mood inflection, Ikaan shows a range of optional morphemes in the verb which translate with adverbial meanings such as ‘just’, ‘still’, ‘again’ or ‘too’ but do not fit the category of adverbs in the language. These morphemes trigger a range of changes in the verbal affixes and the verbal root, both at the segmental and the tonal level. Neither the inflectional nor the semantic side of the tense-aspect-mood system has been described yet, and nothing has previously been written about the meaning, classification and effects of the additional adverb-like morphemes. While this paper cannot give an exhaustive description and analysis of these morphemes, it provides an overview and some preliminary hypotheses about these morphemes.
author_additional Blench, Roger
author_additionalStr Blench, Roger
format Book Chapters
author Salffner, Sophie
author_facet Salffner, Sophie
authorStr Salffner, Sophie
author_letter Salffner, Sophie
title Tense, aspect and manner encoding in Ikaan beyond verbal inflection
publisher Rüdiger Köppe Verlag
publishDate 2012
url https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/12437/