There is No Future: Diachronic Verbal Morphology in Fante Twi
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2011
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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Abstract
The analysis of the future tense in Akan has long proved difficult. This thesis,
based on original fieldwork conducted in the summer of 20101, will attempt to use a
Minimalist framework to capture the complexities of this tense in the Fante dialect.
It will be shown that the future tense in Fante is epiphenomenal, and that in fact the
language has only a binary past/non-past tense system. Diachronic and synchronic
accounts of Fante tense and aspect will be developed, shedding new light on the
possibilities available for morphosyntactic development cross-linguistically.
The Akan future tense shows an extremely limited distribution: It may not
co-occur with any aspectual marker or with either of the motional prefixes. In the
negative, however, it seemingly undergoes a surface morphological alternation with
the progressive aspect and also becomes compatible with the Motion prefixes. The
combination of progressive aspect and future tense does appear possible in the affirmative,
and yet it unexpectedly carries immediate future meaning. Traditionally, all
this complexity has been dismissed as allomorphy: Dolphyne (1988, 1996), Boadi
(2008), and Osam (2008) have all proposed different descriptions of the tense/aspect
system, each without analysis of the underlying syntactic mechanisms creating the
complex distribution of the future tense.
Osam (2008) previously noted that the similarity in form between the COME
motion prefix bE- and the future tense b E-. This, combined with the incompatibility
of the future tense and the motion prefixes, points towards a diachronic origin. It
will be argued that they also share a synchronic syntactic origin in Mot0. Kandybowicz
(2010) provides the first proof that V-to-T raising does occur in Akan. Once
this is established, motional sentences without aspect marking necessarily allow the
motion prefix to raise to T0. The presence of this functional head in a TNON-PAST
head creates an epiphenomenal future reading, now in the process of being reinterpreted
as a true future tense. The analogical pressure of an epiphenomenal future
tense in the affirmative causes the adoption of a similar strategy for forming the future
tense in the negative, namely by reinterpreting the presence of the progressive
aspect in TNON-PAST.
An analysis of the Fante future tense as epiphenomenal provides insight into
the nature of morphosyntactic change cross-linguistically. In Asante Twi, a larger
dialect of Akan, the development of the future tense seems to have gone a step
farther, creating a fully-developed bE- TFUTURE. This may be characterized as an
example of syntactically-driven morphological change, in which existing syntactic
processes create the opportunity for epiphenomenal semantic shift, which in turn
drives true morphological change.