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).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa.de:bsz:15-qucosa-98062 |
| Date | 30 November 2012 |
| Creators | Schadeberg, Thilo C. |
| Contributors | University of Leiden, Humanities, Universität zu Köln, Institut für Afrikanistik |
| Publisher | Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | Swahili (individual language) |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | doc-type:article |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Swahili Forum; 2(1995), S. 158-167 |
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