‘Imperfect tense -a’ of Northern Sotho revisited

Abstract

The distribution of the so-called ‘imperfect tense -a’ in Northern Sotho has traditionally been laid down in the form of a set of rules. The basic principle underlying these rules, however, does not emerge from the traditional treatment of this phenomenon. It is shown that the basic function of -a- only comes to the fore if the wider context of discourse is taken into consideration. The context of discourse determines the old and new information status of components in a sentence, which in turn is directly reflected in the form which the predicate assumes. It appears that -a- functions as a marker of the end of communicative units immediately after the indicative verb. When -a- is accordingly included in the verb, it means that the lexically significant information of a message ends with the verb, while any postverbal information is considered to be redundant in the context of discourse. If, on the other hand, -a- does not appear in the verb, it is indicative of the fact that the postverbal information constitutes new information and is as such included in the communicative unit, displaying a close semantic cohesion with the verb.