Diagramming Grammatical and Lexical Aspect

The case of the Progressive, Anterior, and Resultative in Bungu (Bantu, F25)

Abstract

The interaction of grammatical aspect and lexical aspect has been a topic of interest to linguists for many years, yet only recently has more attention been focused on this topic specifically in relation to Bantu languages. The difficulty of mapping Bantu actional types onto the commonly accepted categorizations has resulted in new frameworks being proposed to take these complex lexicalisations into account. In this paper, we use Croft’s (2012) two-dimensional diagrammatic representations of events to represent the aspectual contour encoded by certain predicates in the South Tanzanian Bantu language Bungu [wun]. We investigate the semantics of the Progressive, Anterior, and Resultative aspects in Bungu, and by identifying the phases within each aspectual contour that are profiled by each of these grammatical aspects, we show that the particular interpretation of each aspect depends on the type of predicate that it modifies. By using Croft’s diagrammatic representations of events to identify the semantic contribution made by different grammatical aspects in Bungu, we illustrate its potential as a descriptive tool.