Abstracts Language, Literature, and Linguistic

The Temporal and Aspectual Semantics and Verbal Tonology of Gisida Anii

by Deborah C. Morton

This study is the first in-depth linguistic study of the structure of Anii, a Kwa language spoken by approximately 50,000 speakers. The focus of this work is on verbs, specifically the semantics of temporal and aspectual reference, and on the tonology of verb stems and related markers. A brief overview of the structure of Anii is also provided. The first part of this study describes and formally analyzes temporal and aspectual reference in a variety of Anii clauses. An important background for this analysis is a discussion of Aktionsarten in Anii. The data presented here shows that developing Anii-internal diagnostics for Aktionsarten leads to a better understanding of the role of Aktionsarten in Anii than relying on translations to determine Aktionsarten does. Two important distinctions regarding temporal and aspectual reference in Anii are between perfective and imperfective aspectual reference, and between future and non-future temporal reference. These distinctions are illustrated with clauses not marked with any tense or aspect markers, with imperfective-marked clauses, and future clauses. Other types of clauses are also investigated. For example, 'cee' is a perfect marker. The far-past marker 'bunga', on the other hand, is not a tense or an aspect marker, but rather a Temporal Remoteness Morpheme (TRM) that restricts the eventuality time of a 'bunga'-marked clause such that it must be at least three weeks before the utterance time of that clause. Some other markers are also briefly discussed, to round out the understanding of the semantics of the Anii verb system.The second part of this study investigates tone on verb stems and surrounding markers, including subject markers, noun-class agreement markers, tense-aspect-modality (TAM) markers, and negation markers. Anii has two surface tone levels, high (H) and low (L), but the L tones are the phonetic pronunciation of toneless syllables. The tone-bearing unit in Anii is the mora, and Anii has typologically unusual syllable structures. For example, while Anii has a length distinction between monomoraic (short) and bimoraic (long) monophthongs, all diphthongs in Anii are short (monomoraic). Additionally, there is a contrast between the tone patterns of diphthongs (which all end in high vowels) and vowel-glide sequences, at least word-finally. Anii has both lexical and grammatical tone, and all the tone patterns within the Anii verb complex can be accounted for with only nine rules and a small set of restrictions as to the domains of application of those rules.This dissertation makes available previously unknown information about the structure of a little-studied language, and also contributes theoretical insights to the fields of formal semantics (e.g. the analysis of the far-past marker 'bunga' as a TRM) and formal phonology (e.g. the proposals regarding prosodification).