Finite verb forms in Beja (Cushitic): Labels vs functions, a historical perspective

Abstract

Abstract The historical overview of the indicative finite verb forms of Beja (Cushitic) shows that several reasons may have induced the choice of labels by the linguists who worked on it since the second half of the 19th century. Linguists of Beja can be divided into two groups: descriptivists and comparatists. The former mostly adapted existing terminologies from various linguistic traditions, rarely explicitly, the latter mostly recycled them. Apart from this partition, several factors behind the choice of a label can be inferred, or are sometimes given by the authors. Beyond the lack of in-depth functional and semantic analysis of the verb forms until very recently, there is a clear-cut distinction between temporal and aspectual labels which correlates with the historical development of aspectual theories, and also with the linguistic traditions for Greek, Indo-European and Semitic. But labels are also linked to “national” traditions, in the sense of language areas (corresponding either to the native language of the authors, or to the language in which the grammars were written), namely German, English and French. Grammars written in German are the oldest ones, and their labels conform to the classical philological tradition of their time, even if at times in contradictory ways. In the most recent publication by German-speaking linguists, an aspectual stance is adopted by the authors, but they hesitate between temporal and aspectual labels, a mixture which is also found, to different extent in one French and one Swedish linguists. Descriptions of the three finite verb form by British scholars, and the Swedish typologist Östen Dahl, show competing motivations: the British terminology, the philological tradition, but also the first steps towards a more detailed analysis of the functions of the paradigms based on a theory of aspect. The French linguists on the other hand belong to the most recent layer of specialists of Beja and they were both trained in Semitic languages (for which aspectual analyses predominate) and for aspectual analysis. Nevertheless both of them took up existing labels for one of the forms (the iː-form) from British linguists, from Roper for Morin (“conditional”) and from Appleyard for Vanhove (“aorist”).