Kiswahili has many ways to express different relations that may hold between two events occurring at the same time. In this paper I examine and contrast the meanings of two types of verbal forms: those with the class 16 relative concord marker -po- and those with the tense marker -ki-. All examples are taken from a single small novel. I conclude that forms with PO tell us where or, more frequently, when something else occurred, whereas events presented in the KI-tense describe the situation existing at the time of some other event (`situative´). When that other event is non-factual the situation presented in the KI-tense expresses a condition. Elsewhere, the situation presented in the KI-tense may be backgrounded (in the discourse analysis sense of the term), but it may also be the main event that is hidden behind a more superficial situation (pace Contini-Morava 1989).

Kiswahili has many ways to express different relations that may hold between two events occurring at the same time. In this paper I examine and contrast the meanings of two types of verbal forms: those with the class 16 relative concord marker -po- and those with the tense marker -ki-. All examples are taken from a single small novel. I conclude that forms with PO tell us where or, more frequently, when something else occurred, whereas events presented in the KI-tense describe the situation existing at the time of some other event (`situative´). When that other event is non-factual the situation presented in the KI-tense expresses a condition. Elsewhere, the situation presented in the KI-tense may be backgrounded (in the discourse analysis sense of the term), but it may also be the main event that is hidden behind a more superficial situation (pace Contini-Morava 1989).