The progressive aspect The perfect aspect

2.6.2 The incompletive aspect

The incompletive aspect in Godié indicates ongoing non-terminated action, including customary and habitual actions. However, even though it may get a present reading, it should not be considered a present tense. Indeed, it can also occur with past tense markers see §2.5.2.1 and §2.5.2.3 above. The incompletive aspect is signalled by a floating mid tone added to the verb root. It replaces the tone of monosyllabic high and low tone roots, but it does not show with a mid tone root or with a high- mid root. It spreads to the right to suffixes without an inherent tone, such as third person pronoun suffixes. Table 2.10 illustrates these changes, as they are represented in the Godié practical orthography. Table 2.10. Tone changes of Godié verb roots in the incompletive aspect Verb tone Example of verb root Incompletive aspect Incompletive aspect + pronoun Mid yi ‘come’ yi yiwa Low -sä ‘take away’ sä säwa High su ‘push’ su suo High-mid kwlie ‘bring down’ kwlie kwlienö ɔ

2.6.3 The progressive aspect

According to Marchese 1986a:29, “progressives are very close semantically to imperfectives in that they too express ongoing actions.” In Godié, the progressive aspect is a periphrastic construction consisting of the verb -k ʋ ‘BE1’ ‘to be at a place’ with completive aspect followed by a locative complement. The complement consists of a compound noun whose first term is the verb of the action in progress and the second term is the noun dä ‘place’, as shown in example 45. 24 45 ɔ -kʋ paadä -aaa 3 S BE 1: CP run:place until ‘He was running until …’ [kokoleko 154] Whereas progressive aspect is very frequent in English, it seems to occur rarely in Godié. Only three times does it occur in the text database for this study of almost 2,500 clauses, and, furthermore, what may be significant is the fact that all three clauses were uttered by older speakers.

2.6.4 The perfect aspect

As Givón 1984:278 points out, the perfect aspect is the most complex component of the tense-aspect- mode system in human languages, displaying “a large degree of intra-language complexity, as well as subtle but real cross-language variability.” This complexity is due to the fact that “it spans the entire functional range, from narrow scope semantics to discourse-pragmatics” ibid.. Its various features are usually found to conflate in the perfect aspect attested in a given language ibid., 283. The perfect aspect in Godié is expressed by the perfect auxiliary yä ‘XPER’. In conversation, whether live or represented, speakers normally use it to indicate the current relevance of the past event expressed by the verb. That current relevance is often expressed in the immediate context, as in example 46. 24 This type of construction to express the progressive aspect is universally attested in languages as different as Welsh, Quechua, Yoruba, Japanese, and even English, where the progressive also derives from a locative construction: he is hunting he is ahunting he is on hunting see Marchese 1986a:67. 46 a. -a mʋ Zakalii n yä kɔgwlɛ plä nä 1 S : TH Zachariah 1 S XPER old_age enter SP 1 ‘I, Zachariah, I have become old, nn -lä yɩɔ yu gää 1 S : XNEG yet anymore child beget I can no longer beget a child, ‘nɩ naa ŋnɔ yä sɩɩ kɔgwlɛ plä nä ADD 1 my wife XPER ADD 3 old_age enter SP 1 and my wife has also become old, so -aa -lä yɩɔ yu gää 1 P : XNEG yet anymore child beget we will no longer have a child.’ [elisabet 29–32] b. wlä -Dacligoo lä t ʋʋ yä yɩ bhɩä [nn] EVD Dacligo say war: DEF XPER now be_finished UPT ‘Well, then Dacligo said, “The war is now over, nä a bhlü yɩ aa - gʋgwaa kʋ [aa] SP 1 2 P take now 2 P : GEN war_fetish VPC UPT so take back your war fetish”’ [dacligo 36–37] The semantic meaning of the perfect aspect as an indicator of the current relevance of a past event is the basis for its discourse-pragmatic role in narrative development see §9.2.4. 25 3 Order of constituents Constituent order is of primary importance for analyzing discourse features in any language. For this reason, before beginning the study of Godié discourse proper, the topic of constituent order needs to be dealt with. After presenting the normal, or default, order of constituents in the clause in §3.1, this chapter will consider variations of that order, or marked constituent order, in §3.2, before looking at dislocated constituents in §3.3.

3.1 Default order of constituents in the clause