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Beyond the past, present, and future: towards the semantics of ‘graded tense’ in Gĩkũyũ

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Abstract

In recent years, our understanding of how tense systems vary across languages has been greatly advanced by formal semantic study of languages exhibiting fewer tense categories than the three commonly found in European languages. However, it has also often been reported that languages can sometimes distinguish more than three tenses. Such languages appear to have ‘graded tense’ systems, where the tense morphology serves to track how far into the past or future a reported event occurs. This paper presents a formal semantic analysis of the tense-aspect system of Gĩkũyũ (Kikuyu), a Northeastern Bantu language of Kenya. Like many languages of the Bantu family, Gĩkũyũ appears to exhibit a graded tense system, wherein four grades of past tense and three grades of future tense are distinguished. I argue that the prefixes traditionally labeled as ‘tenses’ in Gĩkũyũ exhibit important differences from (and similarities to) tenses in languages like English. Although, like tenses in English, these ‘temporal remoteness prefixes’ in Gĩkũyũ introduce presuppositions regarding a temporal parameter of the clause, in Gĩkũyũ these presuppositions concern the ‘event time’ of the clause directly, rather than the ‘topic time’. Consequently, the key difference between Gĩkũyũ and languages like English lies not in how many tenses are distinguished, but in whether tense-like features are able to modify other, lower verbal functional projections in the clause.

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Acknowledgments

This paper would not have been possible without the tireless work of Nancy Gachigo and Sarah Kahando, the principal Gĩkũyũ language consultants for this project. Their patience, energy, and insight are truly exceptional, and I am deeply grateful for all that they’ve taught me of their language. Nĩ wega mũno! This paper also owes much to the extensive comments of three reviewers for NALS, especially those of Professor John M. Mugane, who corrected numerous errors and erroneous statements in an earlier draft. Finally, I would like to thank the following individuals for their insightful and helpful comments upon earlier incarnations of this work: Gennaro Chierchia, Hamida Demirdache, Claire Halpert, C.-T. James Huang, Patrick Jones, Angelika Kratzer, Maria Polinsky, and Judith Tonhauser, as well as an audience at Harvard University (April 20th, 2012).

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  1. Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 226 South College, 150 Hicks Way, Amherst, MA, 01003-9274, United States

    Seth Cable

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Cable, S. Beyond the past, present, and future: towards the semantics of ‘graded tense’ in Gĩkũyũ. Nat Lang Semantics 21, 219–276 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-012-9092-3

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