A Semantic Study of Aspect in Krio (Creoles; Sierra Leone).

Abstract

This study is a semantic description of the grammatical subsystem of aspect in Krio, an African-English Creole language spoken in Sierra Leone, West Africa. The particular focus of the description is on the aspectual representation of dynamic, particular situations, in nonnarratice mode of discourse. The central descriptive problem addressed is to determine the function of the subsystem of aspect and to describe explicitly the semantic content and functional significance of the individual categories making up the system. Two major hypotheses are examined and tested as possible solutions to this problem: (1) that aspect categories represent types of situations, such as 'punctual', 'durative', 'stative', etc.; and (2) that aspect categories represent phases of situations, or situations as wholes, as they are related to some reference point. It is found that the "phases of situations" hypothesis is the more adequate in accounting for the facts presented, and that the "types of situations" hypothesis is not supported at all. This study also addresses certain theoretical and methodological questions in the area of semantic description, and is meant to illustrate an approach to semantic description that is offered as an alternative to previous and current ones. Instead of using "features", metalinguistic labels or symbols that st and for meanings which are only grasped intuitively, this study attempts to arrive at an explicit description of meanings that can be objectively verified. Rather than describing meanings as if they were observables, observables are used ( and facts independently established from psychology) to infer the characteristics of meanings. Particular care is taken with the metalanguage used in linguistic description, especially with regard to the reference of metalinguistic terms. Meanings referred to are considered to be conceptual schemes in the Piagetian sense, and it is contended that any description of a semantic category must include both (1) a principle of integration of instances and subcategories to the whole, and (2) the differentiations or subcategories resulting from its particular applications.