Abstract
In this study we provide a comprehensive phonological and morphological analysis of the complex tense-aspect-mood (TAM) system of Babanki, a Grassfields Bantu language of Cameroon. Our emphasis is on the competing inflectional tonal melodies that are assigned to the verb stem. These melodies are determined not only by the multiple past and future tenses, perfective vs. progressive aspect, and indicative vs. imperative, subjunctive, and conditional moods, but also affirmative vs. negative and “conjoint” (CJ) vs. “disjoint” (DJ) verbal marking, which we show to be more thorough going than the better known cases in Eastern and Southern Bantu. The paper concludes with a ranking of the six assigned tonal melodies and fourteen appendices providing all of the relevant tonal paradigms.
Highlights
The purpose of this paper is to provide a description of tense-aspect-mood marking in Babanki, a Grassfields Bantu language of the Ring subgroup spoken in Western Cameroon (Hyman 1980; Akumbu & Chibaka 2012)
Similar to related Grassfields Bantu languages, we will show that Babanki distinguishes multiple past and future tenses as well as a progressive/non-progressive aspect distinction
As seen in the above forms and in the third column of data in Appendix 1, what is significant is that all progressive forms have the same tonal pattern throughout all of the tenses, which overrides the distinctions found in other columns
Summary
The purpose of this paper is to provide a description of tense-aspect-mood marking in Babanki, a Grassfields Bantu language of the Ring subgroup spoken in Western Cameroon (Hyman 1980; Akumbu & Chibaka 2012). Similar to related Grassfields Bantu languages, we will show that Babanki distinguishes multiple past and future tenses as well as a progressive/non-progressive aspect distinction. Striking is the discovery of a thoroughgoing conjoint-disjoint contrast similar to, but more pervasive than, the CJ/DJ distinctions which have been extensively documented in Narrow Bantu (see the papers in van der Wal & Hyman 2017 and references cited therein). We will first present preliminary aspects of Babanki morphology and tonology (§2), describe the seven indicative tenses as they appear in the perfective (§3), the progressive (§4), and their corresponding negatives (§5). In our conclusion (§8) we present an analysis integrating all of the relevant morphosyntactic features seen to determine the tonal patterns in the preceding sections
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