Refine
Document Type
- Conference Proceeding (2) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (2) (remove)
Keywords
- Afrikanische Sprachen (1)
- Aspekt <Linguistik> (1)
- Bantu (1)
- Bedeutung (1)
- Feldforschung (1)
- Graded Tense (1)
- Hausa-Sprache (1)
- Konditional (1)
- Modalität <Linguistik> (1)
- Modalpartikel (1)
Publicationstate
- Veröffentlichungsversion (2) (remove)
Reviewstate
- Peer-Review (1)
We discuss the modal uses of the Hausa exclusive particle sai (≈ only). We argue that the distribution of sai in modal environments provides evidence for the following claims on the composition of modal meaning that have been independently made in the literature: i) Future-oriented modality involves a prospective aspect operator that can be realized covertly in some languages (e.g. English, Kratzer 2012b) and overtly in others (e.g. Gitksan, Matthewson 2012, 2013). ii) Necessity interpretations arise from exhaustifying possibilities, i.e. an exhaustivity operator applying to existential modality (e.g. Kaufmann 2012 for the case of imperatives and Leffel 2012 for a relevant analysis of necessity meaning in Masalit). We show that future-oriented necessity in Hausa decomposes into EXH((PROSP)), with sai contributing exhaustivity.
In recent years, formal semantic research on the meaning of tense and aspect has benefited from a number of studies investigating languages with graded tense systems. This paper contributes a first sketch of the temporal marking system of Awing (Grassfields Bantu), focusing on two varieties of remote past and remote future. We argue that the data support a "symmetric" analysis of past and future tense in Awing. In our specific proposal, Awing temporal remoteness markers are uniformly analyzed as quantificational tense operators, and both the past and the future paradigm include a form that prevents contextual restriction of this temporal quantifier.