Marchese Lynell. Tense/Aspect and the Development of Auxiliaries in Kru Languages

Publisher: SIL/University of Texas
Publication date: 1986
Number of pages: 315Working on a single language is an exciting task, but an even more exciting one is working on several at a time. The structure of one language becomes clear against the backdrop of another. In this book I have presented material from over fourteen Kru languages, focussing on the areas of tense, aspect, negation, modality, and word order. While I hope a good overview of these systems within this language family has been given, my real goal is to describe the nature of syntactic change in this restricted context. The various syntactic and semantic changes described here are very much in line with wider universal tendencies. Hopefully, then, this study will be of interest not only to Africanists but also to anyone who is interested in the general nature of linguistic change.
My work on Kru began in 1972 when I moved into a warm Godié village in southwest Ivory Coast. Four years later, on the other side of the world, my interest in comparative syntax was sparked in a diachronic seminar taught by Sandra Thompson. So my debts of gratitude go back a long way.