A SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF KIKUYU TENSE AND ASPECT DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University By Marion Rose ^Johnson, M.A., M.A. The Ohio State University 1977 Reading Committee: Approved by: Arnold Zwicky David Dowty Robert Jeffers Adviser Department of Linguistics University of NAIROBI Library UNIVERSITY OF NAIROBI. INST. OF AFRICAN STUO.ES i ir r a RY. ABSTRACT A SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF KIKUYU TENSE AND ASPECT By Marion Rose Johnson, Ph.D. The Ohio State University, 1977 Professor Arnold Zwicky, Adviser The major goal of this dissertation is to propose a model-theoretic treatment of tense and aspect, and to test the theory by applying it to Kikuyu, a Bantu language of Kenya with a particularly large and complex inflectional system for distinctions of this sort. The analysis of tense and aspect is based upon Reichenbach's theory of natural language time reference. Reichenbach claimed that time reference in a natural language involves three distinct time points: the "point of speech", the "point of reference", and the "point of the event". This basic analysis is translated into model-theoretic terms by proposing a semantic system in which the truth of a sentence is evaluated relative to an index consisting of a world, and three times: a moment of time, corresponding to the time of speaking; an interval of time, corresponding to the "reference-time"; and a set of intervals of time, which constitute "episode-time". The categories of tense and aspect - as these are expressed by particular classes of morphemes in Kikuyu - are characterized 1 within this system as follows. First, it is shown that the aspect categories of Kikuyu ("completive", "progressive" and "perfect" aspect) can be analyzed with a set of sentence operators which specify the relation of episode-time to reference-time. Secondly, the categories of tense are shown to specify the relation of reference-time to the time of speaking; in addition, it is demonstrated that the analysis accounts for the semantics of deictic time adverbs which co-occur with different tense forms. Finally, it is shown that the third logically possible set of relations in Reichenbach's system - namely, relations of episode­ time to speaking-time - also play a role in the analysis of Kikuyu. The semantic categories which involve such relations are called existential status categories, because they describe the stage of development of an episode, viewed in relation to the time of speaking. In Kikuyu, there are two such categories, which are designated "manifest action" and "imminent action". These categories are not expressed by any particular morphemes, but rather by a fundamental division in the formal organization of the verbal paradigm. Members of the "manifest action" sub­ paradigm of the verb share the feature that episode-time begins at least several hours earlier than the time of speaking. Hence, forms within this sub-paradigm describe episodes which are "manifest", in the sense that they have reached a relatively advanced stage of development. Forms in the "imminent action" sub-paradigm, on the other hand, describe episodes which either begin just before the time of speaking, or later than this time. 2 Hence, these forms describe episodes which are still in an early stage of development. The last part of the thesis provides a grammar of Kikuyu, based upon the grammar of English presented in Richard Montague's "The proper treatment of quantification in ordinary English". The purpose of this grammar is to show how sentences of Kikuyu can be related in a systematic way to formulae of intensional logic, thus demonstrating the relation between the semantic analysis of tense, aspect and status categories, and the syntax and morphology of Kikuyu. 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am pleased to acknowledge my gratitude to the many people and institutions who have contributed to the completion of this dissertation - to Arnold Zwicky, who has been my adviser and supporter for three years at Ohio State; to David Dowty, who taught me Montague Grammar and gave me many hours of advice on the present work; to Bill Harper, for his help in mastering formal semantics; .to the members of the logic and language group at the University of Western Ontario, especially Chet Creider and Peter Denny, for their interest and encouragement in my research; to the Department of Philosophy at Western Ontario, for providing office space during my dissertation year; to the Canada Council, for two years of support as a doctoral fellow, and for a travel grant to do field-work in Kenya; to the government of Kenya, for permission to do research there; to George Mathu, director of the Institute of African Studies in Nairobi, for his support of my project; to the Department of Linguistics at the University of Nairobi, for its hospitality; and to Kevin Ford of that department, for his invaluable practical aid. Most of all, I want to thank all of the Kikuyu people whom I have encountered in the course of this project, for their exceptional kindness and hospitality. I am indebted above all to Macaria and Gitau, who worked with me during the summer of 1976, and to Nyika and Tony, who worked with me in North America, for their patience and their persistent intellectual honesty in teaching me about the facts of their language. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS........................................... iii VITA...................................................... iv LIST OF TABLES............................................ vii LIST OF FIGURES........................................... viii INTRODUCTION.............................................. 1 Chapter I. GOALS OF THEDISSERTATION .......................... 8 1. An approach to tense and aspect............... 12 2. The Kikuyu inflectional system................. 25 , . -j o 3. Some further considerations................... II. VERB ASPECT...................................... Uo 1. Background to the problem..................... 1-7 2. Interval-based semantics...................... 3. The uninflected form of the verb.............. 4. Completive aspect............................. ( s C 5. Perfect aspect................................ III. PROGRESSIVE ASPECT.............................. 1. Interpretations of progressive aspect......... O J. 2. Previous model-theoretic approaches........... RR 3. The progressive operator...................... ipo 4. Independent motivation for PROG.,.............. v VI IV. THE MANIFEST ACTION SUB-PARADIGM................. 108 1. Past tense and time adverbs................... Ill 2. The category "manifest action"................ 120 3. Immediate past tense................. 131 V. THE IMMINENT ACTION SUB-PARADIGM................... 135 VI. A MONTAGUE GRAMMAR OF KIKUYU..................... 1^9 1. Intensional logic............................. 150 1 6 U 2. The syntactic categories...................... 3. The syntactic rules, and their translation rules...................................... 175 4. Examples.............. 185 appendix A. 191 195 LIST OF REFERENCES 199 LIST OF TABLES . Pb TABLE 1: Summary of time-related distinctions.............. TABLE 2: The manifest action sub-paradigm.................. in TABLE 3: The imminent action sub-paradigm......... ......... TABLE 4: Correspondence of semantic categories and sentence operators.................................. ...... TABLE 5: Summary of the semantic representations of members of the manifest action sub-paradigm............... ° TABLE 6 : Summary of the semantic representations of members of the imminent action sub-paradigm............... ^ 7 TABLE 7: Syntactic categories of Kikuyu.................... ±6 5 TABLE 8 : Output of the paradigmatic formation rules for hanyuka "run"..................................... vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Relations among the temporal indices............. l9 Figure 2: Relation of episode-time to reference-time for the three aspect form categories.................... 20 Figure 3: Identification of inchoative verbs.............. 73 Figure 4: Identification of state, activity, and accomplish­ ment verbs....................................... 8U Figure 5: The syntactic mapping of forms in the tense and aspect paradigm.................................. 172 viii INTRODUCTION This dissertation provides a semantic analysis of tense and aspect in terms of temporal relations among three separate times involved in an utterance, the time of speaking, the time referred to, and the time at which the episode described took place. An informal exposition of the ideas is given, followed by an analysis in terms of the model-theoretic semantics developed by Richard Montague. This analysis is carried out for the tense and aspect inflectional system of Kikuyu, a Bantu language spoken primarily in Kenya. This language was chosen because it has a particularly large and interesting system, with considerable differences from certain features of the simpler English system. Some idea of the themes of the dissertation can be gathered if three of the main points are mentioned: a) aspect categories are separated from tense, by defining aspect in terms of relations between reference-time and episode­ time, while tense is defined as relations between reference-time and the time of speaking; b) in addition to tense and aspect, a third set of relations - those between speaking time and episode-time - are shown to play a role in the Kikuyu system; these relations are called existential status