The Hausa Aspect System

In the paper the authors hope to account for the aspect marking constructions of modern Hausa by providing detailed historical explanations of their origin and development, beginning with morphological forms and syntactic patterns reconstructed for Proto-Hausa. The description accounts for the asymmetry in certain paradigms, the lack of parallelism between affirmative and negative paradigms in certain aspects, and some of the differences between contemporary dialects. The hypotheses about Hausa history are supported by reliable comparative data from other Chadic languages.