The Hausa perfective tense-aspect used in wh-/focus constructions and historical narratives: a unified account

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Main author: Jaggar, Philip J.
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id eprints-133
recordtype eprints
institution SOAS, University of London
collection SOAS Research Online
language English
language_search English
description In this paper I revisit and elaborate some of the ideas I outlined in the earlier paper, concentrating on the semantic characteristics of the paired Perfective tense-aspects in a major (universal) discourse context—spontaneously-produced past-time narrative. The main focus is on the role of the paradigm known traditionally (and unfortunately) as the “Relative Perfective”, a set which is in partial complementary distribution with the “General/Neutral Perfective”. This specially inflected tense-aspect form is the one exploited at discourse-level to assert prominent events on the time-axis in foregrounded narrative sequences, but it is also required in classic clause-level wh-constructions, i.e., wh-interrogatives, declarative focus constructions, and relative clauses, operations which often share structural properties across languages. The central claim is that the fronted focus/wh- constructions and pivotal foregrounded portions of past-time narratives utilize the same specialized Perfective tense-aspect morphology because they achieve the same discourse-pragmatic goals—they all supply the most communicatively PROMINENT and focal NEW information.
author_additional Hyman, Larry M.
author_additionalStr Hyman, Larry M.
format Book Chapters
author Jaggar, Philip J.
author_facet Jaggar, Philip J.
authorStr Jaggar, Philip J.
author_letter Jaggar, Philip J.
title The Hausa perfective tense-aspect used in wh-/focus constructions and historical narratives: a unified account
publisher J.M. Dent and Co
publishDate 2006
url https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/133/

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