Towards a Typology of DIE Verbs in African Languages

This paper constitutes an essay in comparative lexical semantics and typology, comparing DIE verbs in nine African languages: Arabic, Tigrinya, Hausa, Dinka, Maa, Chindali, Kinyarwanda, Yoruba, and Akan. Cross-linguistically, DIE verbs, although referring to the same human event, differ in their aspectual structure. Primary DIE verbs, representative of Vendler's class of achievement verbs, provide not only an interesting case study of a single lexical verb, but also an excellent exemplar of the class type. The author proposes that the four types of DIE verbs identified also constitute the potential range of all achievement verbs

Variation and Word Formation in Proto-Bantu: The Case of *-YIKAD-

This article is published with the permission of the author

On the notion “inchoative verb” in KinyaRwanda

This article is published with the permission of Peeters Publishers.Certain verbs in KinyaRwanda—kú-rwáàrà “to be(come) sick” and gú-túùrà “to live/reside,” for example—have been considered by many linguists (cf. Coupez 1980, Overdulve 1976, Kimenyi 1973) to be stative verbs. The present analysis suggests that it would be better to consider them as “inchoative verbs,” of which three sub-classes can be defined according to linguistic evidence proper to KinyaRwanda itself. The significant aspect of the characterization of inchoatives is the punctual nature attributed to the nucleus of the events named by these verbs; a phenomenon which determines to a great extent their observed linguistic behaviour

Reduction in remoteness distinctions and reconfiguration in the Bemba past tense

Bantu languages are well-known for having multiple remoteness distinctions in both the past and the future. This paper looks at the 4-way remoteness distinction of Bemba (central Bantu) showing that the system is undergoing change that is resulting in the loss of an intermediate past tense, by merger with the remote past. Two factors are central in driving this change; a merger of forms by tone loss and neutralisation and a shift in the scope of semantic function. Because the Bemba tense-aspect system manifests the so-called conjoint-disjoint alternation, there is also some reconfiguration of the TA system that accompanies the merger. The different factors involved in this change are unified under a cognitive multi-dimensional approach to tense, which is here extended to account for language change in tense systems