A Theoretical Account of Grammatical Tense and Aspect in Kirundi

This article aims to account for the Kirundi language temporal categories, i.e. grammatical tense and aspect, and starts with background information on the Kirundi verbal domain as well as the role of the noun class system in the subject-verb-object morphosyntactic agreements. We argue that a conjugated verb in Kirundi is always separately marked in both tense and aspect, with the former occupying the prefixed infix position while the latter is a suffix at the verb ending. The language has five tenses enumerated as the immediate, recent past, remote past, conditional, and future tenses. With regard to aspects, they include the imperfective a, the perfective ye, and the prospective e. While both tense and aspect are always separately marked on any conjugated verb in Kirundi, the tense-aspect interaction is governed by agreement constraints: the imperfective -a agrees with all the five tenses, the perfective -ye goes with all tenses except the future, while the prospective -e agrees with only the immediate and future tenses. This article contributes to bridging the gap existing in the Bantu linguistic literature in general, and in Kirundi linguistics in particular.This article aims to account for the Kirundi language temporal categories, i.e. grammatical tense and aspect, and starts with background information on the Kirundi verbal domain as well as the role of the noun class system in the subject-verb-object morphosyntactic agreements. We argue that a conjugated verb in Kirundi is always separately marked in both tense and aspect, with the former occupying the prefixed infix position while the latter is a suffix at the verb ending. The language has five tenses enumerated as the immediate, recent past, remote past, conditional, and future tenses. With regard to aspects, they include the imperfective a, the perfective ye, and the prospective e. While both tense and aspect are always separately marked on any conjugated verb in Kirundi, the tense-aspect interaction is governed by agreement constraints: the imperfective -a agrees with all the five tenses, the perfective -ye goes with all tenses except the future, while the prospective -e agrees with only the immediate and future tenses. This article contributes to bridging the gap existing in the Bantu linguistic literature in general, and in Kirundi linguistics in particular.

Keywords:

African languages , Bantu linguistics , Kirundi Morphosyntax , Tense , Aspect , Semantics