A Diachronic Change of the Gerundive in Tigrinya

Weldu Michael Weldeyesus

Abstract for paper presented at
39th Annual Conference of African Linguistics
Athens, Georgia
April 18-20, 2008

Similar to other Semitic languages, Tigrinya has a verbal system involving fairly numerous inflections and derivations. The verb may be inflected for such things as person, number, gender, aspect, mood, tense, benefactive, causative, transitive, passive, relative, instrumental, dative, locative, infinitive, frequentative, reciprocal, and so on (Girmay, 1992; Bender & Fulass, 1978). More specifically, a verb can be manifest in various forms depending on aspectual criteria and some morphological categories of verbs, namely, gerundive, imperative or jussive, and infinitive. This study deals primarily with the gerund form for the following reasons. First, past actions in Tigrinya can be expressed in either the perfect or gerund forms in Tigrinya contrary to other Ethiopian Semitic languages, which use only the perfect form. Second, the gerund form is becoming more and more common to refer to past actions and is in fact replacing the perfect form. The latter, which has been confined to the narration of stories, is not in use even for that function in present day Tigrinya. Third, the use of the gerund to refer to past actions has also given rise to serial verb constructions in Tigrinya, where not only the principal verb but also all other verbs in the list can be finite. This is not the case in other Ethiopian Semitic languages. The above observations have been confirmed with data obtained for the study, which examines the diachronic change the gerund form in Tigrinya has undergone using both internal reconstruction and comparative method. This enables to see not only the current use of the gerund but also its prior functions. For the internal construction, two Tigrinya texts (of stories) from Wolf Leslau's Documents Tigrinya (1941) have been typically used. The stories were told to five native speakers of Tigrinya, who were then asked to retell the stories the next day to minimize the priming effect. For the comparative method, two other Ethiopian Semitic languages, namely, Amharic and Ge'ez have been considered.

Weldu Michael Weldeyesus is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a member of the Colorado Research in Linguistics editorial board. He can be reached at: Weldu.Weldeyesus@Colorado.EDU.