The past and present in marking futurity in Sango

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that future tense is not a grammatical category in Sango and that none of the temporal adverbs is used in a verbal system as a grammatical marker for future time. Supporting this thesis is evidence of different kinds: (1) rather than a pattern in the use of the temporal adverbs there is widespread intersubjective variation, a conclusion based on the study of tape recordings from the early 1960s, radio broadcasts from the early 1970s, and tape recordings from 1988 to 1994 - in addition to data from interviews; (2) future tense is grammaticalized in neither Ngbandi, Sango's lexifier language, nor in the substrate languages, all belonging to the Ubangian Group; (3) the emerging Bantu pidgins that would have been spoken by some of the foreign African personnel at the time of Sango's birth did not provide the kind of model that would have led to a system based on adverbs. Since the standardization of a written language by missionaries, an alleged future tense has been imposed. In recent years, it is being promoted - in a slightly different form - by some of Central Africa's elite, a phenomenon accompanied by the Ngbandi-ization of the language. The value of this paper is in part linguistic - although it may be unusual in linguistics to argue that something does not occur in a language - and in part historical, the latter because it documents sociopolitical forces at work in the creation of grammar.