Beyond Time - Linguistics - University of California, Berkeley

immediate question under discussion, which seems instead to be something like ‘was the food
sufficient?’. 28
(383) “. . . yêyí ìnsìmà, íwè wékùtà?” . . . “ Íwè tàndìnékùtà!”
“. . . yeyi insima, iwe wa-ikut-a?”
. . . “iwe
. . . cl9.dem cl9.nshima 2sg.pron 2sg.cmpl-become.full-fv . . . 2sg.pron
ta-ndi-na-ikut-a!”
neg-1sg-pst-become.full-fv
‘ “...Hey, that food...are you full [=have you become full]?” . . . “Man, I’m not full
[I didn’t get full]!”’ (ZT2009NarrA62.CN, kaShakame naMulikani) 29
Thus, -ite’s functions as a stativizer presupposing relevance are evident in its narrative
uses, where it allows speakers to depict situations as states (making them more depictive
than narrative) that are relevant for the story’s action.
6.7 -ite in Bantu: a historical and comparative view
6.7.1 -ite across Bantu
Suffixes similar to -ite – most commonly -ile, but with a wide variety of phonological variation
(for an extensive overview, see Bastin 1983) – are found across Bantu. To an even higher
degree than many other markers of tense and aspect, these markers seem to have complicated
temporal interpretations in many languages. For one thing, temporal interpretations appear
to be highly dependent on verbal situation type in numerous languages: -ile often has an
anterior meaning with non-inchoative verbs and a present stative reading with inchoative that
express “a change of condition or location of the experiencer or patient”, including a “change
or transition from one state to another” (Botne & Kershner 2000:165). 30 Morphemes with
these semantics are typically characterized as resultative, rather than anterior. However,
28 The distinction here is subtle. It could be argued that the answer to the question ‘are you full?’ does
provide an answer to the immediate question under discussion ‘was the food sufficient?’, but it seems here
that the storyteller wants to highlight the inadequacy of the food rather than the character’s state. In
mentioning the food and then asking about the friend’s state of hunger in the same utterance, perhaps the
speaker is avoiding raising the question twice, first overtly and then presuppositionally.
Another important note is that the (hodiernal) completive -a- marker can also give anterior-like readings.
These are different from the resultant state meanings with -ite. Also they are not required: a simple past
reading, with no current relevance, is possible.
29 In the free translation, I have used ‘man’ to communicate the colloquial nature of this conversation,
which uses the 2sg pronoun íwè.
30 Nurse (2008:97) briefly describes the distinction in interpretations for the anterior as between “stative
and inchoative” verbs on the one hand (present readings with anterior), and “dynamic” on the other (“true”
anterior readings). However, because Bantu, in contrast to English, appears to encode entry into most
states as an inherent part of the situation, this distinction may be less meaningful than the inchoative/noninchoative
situation-type dichotemy as employed in Botne & Kershner (2000), or the durative/change-of-state
distinction in Seidel (2008).
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