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

Jaggar, Philip J.

Abstract

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.

Citation

Jaggar, P. J. (2006). The Hausa perfective tense-aspect used in wh-/focus constructions and historical narratives: a unified account. In L. M. Hyman, & P. Newman (Eds.), West African Linguistics: Descriptive, Comparative, and Historical Studies in Honor of Russell G. Schuh (100-133). J.M. Dent and Co

• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2006
• Deposit Date: Jan 8, 2007
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 21, 2025
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: Studie
• Pages: 100-133
• Book Title: West African Linguistics: Descriptive, Comparative, and Historical Studies in Honor of Russell G. Schuh
• ISBN: 0039-3533
• Keywords: Historical narrative, focus constructions, Hausa, wh-constructions, foregrounding