Tense, Aspect, Mood and Aktionsart in Mesqan: A South Ethio-Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia

Abstract

：Mesqan is a South Ethio-Semitic tongue which is mainly worn in day-to-day message by a people of 179,737 communities in the Gurage Zone, Ethiopia, whose linguistic skin was not well expressed. The inner aspire of this paper is to offer a complete account of tense, aspect, mood and aktionsart structures of the Mesqan tongue. The paper is expressive in character, as the lessons are mostly worried with telling what is really being in the tongue, and mostly rely on main linguistic facts. The linguistic facts, i.e. the elicited grammatical facts regarding tense, aspect, mood and aktionsart, were composed from local speakers of the tongue during 12 months of fieldwork mannered among 2011 and 2012 in four Mesqan villages and in Butajira, the managerial hub of the Mesqan Woreda. The perfective aspect in the tongue emphasizes the endpoint of the oral state with dynamic verbs, but the imperfective aspect relates with the lexical semantics of the verb, which can be practical when their purposes with stative and dynamic verbs are evaluated. Concerning tense, the past and the non-past tense in the tongue are distinguished by assisting verbs and a verb in the imperfective aspect is able to happen with states in the past and in the non-past, i.e. present or future. Future time can also be uttered by an anticipated act throughout the grouping of the future. In addition, an action happening in the past and still around in the tongue is marked by a zero morpheme in the present perfect. Concerning mood, the language has agent-oriented moods that are articulated by verb inflection, and speaker-oriented moods that are articulated by a periphrastic structure. Regarding aktionsart that denotes a specific phase in a verbal condition, like period, regularity, etc. Mesqan has two aktionsarten which are noticeable by periphrastic structures, that is the progressive and the prospective.