Le système aspecto-temporel du moore

This article presents the structure of the tense-aspect system of Moore (Gur, Niger Congo), a language spoken in Burkina Faso by nearly half of the population, for the purpose of framing it from a typological viewpoint. Section 2 describes the basic structure of the system : morpheme order and principal components, with the fundamental dichotomy between regular and irregular verbs (traditionally referred to as verbs of ‘ action’/‘ state’). Section 3 discusses mood and modality, and provides essential information on several constituent details of Moore morphosyntax, such as the – la assertive marker and its allomorphs (or the contexts for its omission) and the expletive – me. Section 4 provides a list of the main aspectual and temporal predicates, that is, independent particles that express notions of time or aspect (excluding predicates that, from an interlinguistic point, may express information of an adverbial nature). Sections 5 and 6 describe the articulation of an aspect (perfective/ imperfective) and temporal reference. Finally, section 7 situates the aspectual and temporal system of Moore in a general typological context.