Tense and Aspect in English and Kiluba: The Role of ‎Suffixation and Prosody

Ilunga Bwana Norbert

Abstract


Tense and aspect have been one of the most intriguing language issues when comparison is made in different languages. The reason for this is that languages do not always share the same linguistic background. This is the case of English and Kiluba. Tense and aspect have been widely studied at the morphological and semantic levels and very little or nothing has been discussed with regard to the impact of prosody at the tense and aspectual levels. This article therefore purports to contrast the notion of tense and aspect as seen in these two languages. It has been found that the relationship in the two languages is not one to one and that apart from suffixation which typically is found in both languages, Kiluba has been found to be relying on suprasegmental phonemes to render different meanings bound to the suffixes expressing the present and past perfect and the simple past tenses.


Keywords


tense, aspect, English, Kiluba, prosody

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References


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