Absolute-relative tense in Old Kanembu: foregrounding by posterior taxis

Old Kanembu is an extinct Saharan language that survives in annotations to the Qur’anic manuscripts of the 17th to 18th century. The past and future categories of Old Kanembu are absolute-relative tenses with posterior taxis as their orientational mechanism. The posterior location of events in temporal domains is tied up with the communicative goal of guiding the recipient through the complex Qur’anic discourse so that the foreground information and prominent elements are clearly set off against the background events. Similar properties are reported for the past and future tenses in Kanuri and therefore the Old Kanembu data corroborates a previously postulated hypothesis that the past and future in Kanuri are inherently focus categories (Wolff & Löhr 2006). Given that complexity of the Kanuri TAM system – significantly more elaborated than in the other Saharan languages – was triggered by the contact with Chadic languages and that Old Kanembu preserves archaic features going back to the 16th century and beyond, the semantic properties of the Old Kanembu past and future provide additional evidence of early Chadic influence on Kanuri.