A. The Many Ways to Open a Door. The data sets in this section are designed to illustrate processes of sentence formation and the signaling of tense, aspect, and mood. For each language, a basic sentence about a woman opening a door undergoes a series of changes in verb tense, aspect, and mood. There are 13-20 sentences in each language. The sentence numbers are keyed to one another across languages. For example, sentence 3a in Bemba has roughly the same meaning as sentence 3a in Samoan. Students can work through the data sets to identify morphological processes and to make typological comparisons. A set of homework questions is at the end of the Opening Doors data sets. Click on the underlined sentences to hear audio clips.

Russian

This set of sentences illustrates the different ways that a single verb stem can be inflected with different morphemes to convey tense, negation, aspect, and mood.

In total, Russian has: 1 non-past tense; 1 past tense;and 2 aspects.These sentences are just a selection of examples.

The first line indicates the standard transliteration from cyrillic to latin for Russian. The second line indicates the grammatical breakdown. The third line provides grammatical glosses and English translations of the morphemes.

Bemba

How many different ways can Mulenga open the door?

This set of sentences illustrates the different ways that a single verb stem can be inflected with different morphemes to convey tense, negation, aspect, and mood.

In total, Bemba has: 1 present tense; 3 basic past tenses (past today, past recent, and past remote); 2 past perfect tenses (today and remote); 3 future tenses (inceptive, today future, and later future); 2 progressive aspect markers; 1 habitual aspect marker; and 5 other mood markers for imperatives, hypotheticals, and conditionals. These sentences are just a selection of examples.

The first line indicates the correct spelling in Zambia's standard orthography for Bemba. The second line indicates the grammatical breakdown. The third line provides grammatical glosses and English translations of the morphemes.

Samoan

How many different ways can Sina open the door?

This set of sentences illustrates the different ways that a single verb stem can be inflected with different morphemes to convey tense, negation, aspect, and mood.

Samoan, like most Polynesian languages, is a verb-initial language where the verb complex normally comes first in the sentence before either the subject or the object. This verb complex consists of the verb root which is preceded by a particle that marks tense and aspect. The verb root itself does not change except with a few important exceptions to mark number. Tense and aspect are signaled by the 11 different tense-aspect markers that precede the verb root in the verb complex. The Samoan language has: a present indefinite tense; a present progressive; a present immediate/completive; two past tenses (simple past, past perfect); a future tense; and aspect markers including a prescriptive (marking that an action should take place) and a desiderative (marking the desirability of an action). The following sentences are just a selection of examples and do not demonstrate the full extent of Samoan's tense-aspect system.

The first line indicates the Samoan transcription of the sentence. The second line indicates the grammatical breakdown. The third line provides grammatical glosses and English translations of the morphemes.

Homework

Study the data sets for Bemba, Russian, and Samoan and write up a 850-1000 word (typed, single-spaced) discussion of the following questions:

1. What are some of the key differences in the ways that Bemba, Russian, and Samoan handle verb tense (past, present, future)?
2. Which language seems to have the greatest number of options in tense, aspect, and mood marking? Explain.
3. Do you see any places where tense/aspect/mood nuances in the language seem to get lost in the translation into English?
4. How is the syntax of questions different from the syntax of statements in these languages?
5. Do you see anything interesting going on in sentence 11?
6. Other remarks?