Inflectional forms of tense and aspect in Ateso

Abstract

This paper is an analysis of tense and aspect in Ateso, an Eastern Nilotic language. Ateso distinguishes between past and non-past tenses: the past tense is marked by a low tone on the syllable peaks of the verb, while the non-past is marked by a high tone on the verb nucleus. With regard to aspect, it distinguishes between the following: imperfective, perfective, consecutive, perfect, habitual, and iterative. The first five aspects are marked morphologically by the morphemes -i, -it, ko-, a- and -nene respectively. The iterative is marked by reduplication of the verb root. Since tone, tense and aspect are assigned differently in each of the TesoTurkana subgroups, it is important that they are analysed separately for a clear view of these concepts and how they are represented specifically in Ateso.