2 Responses to “Position of Tense-Aspect Affixes”

1. Hilda Koopman Says:
   December 28th, 2008 at 2:21 am

   Samoan is described as having independent TA particles (Hovdhaugen and Mosel 1992) (thus no inflectional tense/aspect marking)

2. Matthew S. Dryer Says:
   February 20th, 2009 at 4:09 pm

   The coding of Samoan as having tense-aspect prefixes is based on a single prefix tau- which is described by Marsack (1962: 35) as indicating continued or repeated action. The same prefix is described by Mosel and Hovdhaugen (1992: 190), but Marsack’s example illustrates the aspectual use more clearly (tau-mate ‘to keep guessing’; cf. mate ‘guess’). Note that in coding a language as having tense-aspect prefixes, there is no implication that this is the normal way to indicate tense or aspect in the language, just the normal way among morphological means, even if, as is the case in Samoan, the morphological means are marginal relative to the use of separate words.

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