Abstract:
This article aims to give a semantic study of the reflexes of one specific
tense/aspect form, namely the so-called *-a-B-a construction, in a cluster of about
40-odd Kikongo language varieties spoken in a wide area around the mouth of the
Congo River in Central Africa. We first present a detailed analysis of the multiple
uses of these cognate constructions at sentence level, in order to arrive at a formal
and semantic reconstruction for the most recent common ancestor of the Kikongo
Language Cluster, namely Proto-Kikongo. The analysis departs from the overall
aspectual meaning of the linguistic expression in which the tense-aspect construction
is used. Therefore, we also take into consideration the contribution of different
aspectual tiers, such as lexical and grammatical aspect, adverbials and taxis constructions.
Through the discussion of themultiple uses of the -a-B-a construction,we
argue that its overall meaning is complex, combining both temporal and aspectual
semantics. It is furthermore shown that a lexical-aspect distinction between statesof-
affairs with transitional versus non-transitional temporal structure is crucial in
order to understand the various uses of the -a-B-a construction. Methodologically, the formal and semantic reconstruction to Proto-Kikongo are based on a thorough
comparison of a multitude of existing data sources, some of which several centuries
old, as well as original fieldwork. This bottom-up approach has rarely been pursued
over the past half century in Bantu grammatical reconstructions.
