Present participle subject prefix + stem

5.1.5 Present participle subject prefix + stem The present participle has imperfective aspect and is typically used in subordinate clauses. However, it is used very extensively in Makonde texts, sometimes in a quasi-independent way. It plays a distinctive role in discourse terms. The first use of the present participle is the standard one of describing events in a subordinate adverbial clause. This is illustrated below, in clause 16c of 07 Mother and child, where the mother kumwidanavo ‘has brought him back’ default narrative atukuta ‘running’ present participle. 07 Mother and Child use of present participle used adverbially with finite verb 16b. kumwidanavo DEF NARR brought.him.with 16c. atukuta PRES PART kulyutu running to.place …and ran back carrying him to the place… Other examples from 07 Mother and child are clauses 11d–e, where the soldiers are described as having left anterior the village vapita vaomba ‘passing on and shooting’; and in clauses 3c–d, where the soldiers go out default narrative vatenda ingondo ‘making war’ and vavabyanga venentete mmakaja ‘killing the inhabitants in the villages’. None of these examples is foreground material: 16b–c is recapitulated material in the conclusion, 11d–e is background the situation the mother found when she returned to the village and 3c–d is scene-setting in the orientation. The second use is where the present participle has a semi-independent status: this occurs where there are simultaneous, but separate, actions, usually with different participants. The present participle therefore stands on its own in a new clause with a switch of participant as subject. This is in contrast to the use above, which is used adverbially to describe a single action or event. For simultaneous but separate actions, the verb used for the first action is always a finite verb such as the default narrative, and for the second action a present participle is used. There are several examples of this in 07 Mother and child, including the one below, where an aeroplane drops bombs overhead with soldiers vapita ‘passing’ over the ground. 07 Mother and Child use of present participle in separate clause indicating simultaneous action 5a. Bai ndege S kushanya kwomba DEF NARR So aeroplane above bombed 5b. na vamadodo vapita PRES PART pai. and footsoldiers they.passing ground. So an aeroplane went overhead dropping bombs, and the infantry went over the ground below. Another example is clause 15a of 07 Mother and child, where we found a mother rescuing her child, while the husband [was] ‘saying’ aashidoni…. This example is interesting because the initial clause about the mother is a dependent clause with the past imperfective adverbial verb pashitenda; so, unless the present participle is treated as an independent verb, there is no full finite verb in this speech-introducing clause at all. 07 Mother and Child use of present participle with preceding dependent verb indicating simultaneous action 15a. Pashitenda ndyagwe ntwagwe aashidoni PRES PART When.was. doing his.wife her.husband saying. thus 15b. haunauke you.must.not.go While the wife was doing this, the husband was just saying, “Don’t go….” An example from a different text is found in clauses 33a–c of 09 Ákalimanya below. Here, after the protagonist Ákalimanya makes it clear he is going to defraud the villagers of the elephant meat they have caught together, the villagers kuujananga kuku kukaja ‘all returned went home’ atangadika ‘complaining’. An interesting feature is that, although it is actually the same people—the villagers—carrying out the separate but simultaneous operations, there is a new noun phrase kula munu ‘each person’ governing the present participle. 09 Ákalimanya use of present participle with separate noun phrase indicating simultaneous action 33a. Namwiu tuvanu kuujananga DEF NARR And.true we.people returned.all 33b. kuka DEF NARR kukaja went to.home 33c. kula munu atangadika. PRES PART each person complaining. And that’s what we did; we all went home, everyone grumbling. The third use of the present participle is in sentence-initial subordinate clauses. It is a type of mirror image of the second use. It is usually, but not always, followed by the default narrative. The norm is for the subject of the subordinate and the following main clauses to be the same, but if the switch of participant is specified, that does not have to be the case. This use does not occur in 07 Mother and child but one will see from the example 03 Hyena and Pied Crow below, the subject of the sentence-initial clause with the present participle and the following default narratives is the same; and likewise this is the case in the example from 02 Lion and Hamerkop below, where there is a switch of participant. 03 Hyena and Pied Crow use of present participle in sentence initial subordinate clause; same participant 12a. Litunu aaloka PRES PART kundila Hyena he.coming on.road 12b. --- kulola DEF NARR looked 12c --- kudo: DEF NARR said: 12d. Inyama abaa “Meat surprise” When Hyena was coming back from his farm, he stared in surprise and exclaimed, “My goodness Meat” 02 Lion and hamerkop use of present participle in sentence initial subordinate clause; participant switch 3a. Napanelo muliduva limo nae amamena PRES PART inyama yake Now on.day one he eating meat his 3b. [AFTER VERB] linímwikala PAST ligwangwa S pangulo. stuck.him bone at.throat. Now one day, while he was eating his meat, a bone got stuck in his throat. 5.1.6 The -ka- consecutive The structure of this tense is identical to that of the conditional tense in Makonde: subject concord + ka + verb stem with H tone on the penultimate syllable. It was noted above, in section 5.1.1, that there are two narrative tenses in Makonde: the first is the default narrative, formed with ku-, which describes a sequential verb on the event-line, with no special prominence in comparison with other events. It carries the main propositions on the storyline. The second narrative tense is the -ka- consecutive, which is an event-line verb; however, unlike the default narrative it does not occur in background sentences. Its function is to downgrade the importance of that verb in the chronological sequence in contrast to what is following, and at the same time as maintaining the verb as an action on the event line. Unlike the default narrative, the ka- consecutive shows subject agreement. The past perfective has also been describing as a tense that gives prominence to the following events see section 5.1.1 above. The distinction could be understood as follows: the past perfective slows the narrative, in order to give more weight to what follows; and the -ka- consecutive tense speeds the narrative up, ‘packaging’ verbs in order to reach the prominent material that follows. It has been proposed in Bantu studies that the -ka- formative is derived from the stem of the verb ‘go’, which in Makonde is found as –uka. 36 In Makonde the distal -ka- is found in imperatives such as katwale ‘go and get’. There is also a conditional -ka- which refers not only to conditionals, but also to potential or possible events, and to temporal events in a sequence. The primary sense in which the -ka- consecutive tense is used is one of the secondary meanings of the conditional -ka-, that of a temporal event in a sequence. There is a great deal of text variation in the use of the -ka- consecutive. It tends to be absent in shorter, tightly-controlled texts, where all events are seen as equally significant, and therefore it is somewhat under-represented in this text corpus. Our corpus shows two of the three discourse uses of the -ka- consecutive. The first use of the -ka- consecutive is in the preliminaries before a particularly significant speech. This may be the speech introducer itself, or it may be another verb in the preliminaries introducing a significant speech and could be glossed as ‘when x said’. 02 Lion and hamerkop the -ka- consecutive used in speech introducer 11a. Shengo aju akamwaulila -KA- CONSECUTIVE doni: Hamerkop this he.said.to.him thus: 11b. bai nangolo apa [AFTER VERB] haunapagwa mwaa S “So elder here there.does.not.exist problem Hamerkop said to him, “Well, sir, this isn’t much of a problem…” 09 Ákalimanya the -ka- consecutive used in preliminaries before important speech 8a. Mwiu --- akavashema -KA- CONSECUTIVE vanu uti True --- he.called.them people all 8b. --- kudo DEF NARR said, 8c. nangu --- shipali “I thing.is 36 Rose et al. 2003 28 state that, Distal elements, such as -ka-…are thought to derive from verbs meaning go or leave often given a reading go and V..., p. 28. 8d. shangulota that.I.want 8e. kummanyiya mmavangu. to.inform.you my.friends.” And so he did call all the people there, and told them, “There’s something I want to tell you all, my friends.” The second use of the -ka- consecutive is to downgrade one action in order to highlight a following action, within the same sentence. This may be because the second action is more significant thematically, or it may be because the first verb is intrinsically less important, such as verbs of preparation. Clause 12b of 07 Mother and child is an example of downgrading with the purpose of moving the story forward and giving prominence to following events: the mother kunnambela ‘looked’ for the child default narrative, akankodya ‘found him’ hidden in a bush the -ka- consecutive and kutwala kuujanavo ‘then returned with him’ default narrative to her husband. Because the theme of the story is the comparison between the mother’s courage and the husband’s lacklustre performance, the actual finding of the child safe and well in a bush—although important to the participant—is not given any prominence compared with her return to the husband, who has stayed skulking in safety. 07 Mother and Child use of the -ka- consecutive downgrading one verb to highlight others 12a. Nae kunnambela DEF NARR apalá She searched.for.him there 12b. akankodya -KA- CONSECUTIVE mwanagwe and.found.him her.child 12c. alipidye palyukutu he.hidden in.bush 12d. kutwala kuujanavo DEF NARR kavili then returned.with again 12e. nakodyania PURPOSIVE na ntwagwe. and.met with husband.her. She searched for her child and found him hidden in a bush; then she went back with him and met her husband. Another example from the same text is clause 9a of 07 Mother and child, where the mother akatukuta kuja ‘runs back’ the -ka- consecutive to the enemy-occupied village, while her husband kudoni ‘says’ default narrative that she must not do that or she’ll be killed. Again, the relative prominence of the verbs, which would be counter-intuitive for the average listener, is due to the theme of the story: it is her husband’s lack of personal action and cowardly advice—albeit ignored—which is highlighted in this sentence. Thirdly, and at a higher discourse level, the -ka- consecutive is used to downgrade whole sentences in the first few episodes of a story, where these are seen by the narrator as preliminary events in a story. These are still on the event-line; they are not background material; however, the ‘main action’ has yet to start. This text corpus contains texts too short and concise to illustrate this last use, but longer stories show it clearly. 37 37 In one rather wordy travel story of over 400 sentences, the first 70 sentences used this -ka- packaging tense almost exclusively, after which it was not seen again. author, unpublished text. An example from outside this text corpus is found in an oral recording of a Bible story, viz., The Parable of the Prodigal Son from Luke chapter 15. 38 In this story the -ka- consecutive was used eleven times in a 49-sentence story, with the majority of uses occured in the first 14 sentences. Also noteworthy, of the others, all but one are in speech introducers, and the other is just before a crucial event. In most of these instances, ‘downgrading’ takes place to move the story forward as a whole, rather than to highlight the immediately following events. The use of the -ka- consecutive makes it clear that for this storyteller, the whole of the prodigal son’s escapade is simply a necessary preliminary to his return to his father. 5.1.7 Purposive na- + stem