Language Documentation and Revitalisation in African Languages. Tense and Aspect Marking in Rutagwenda
Domaine:
natural language processing
This article presents an in-depth descriptive analysis of tense and aspect marking in Rutagwenda, a lesser-studied Bantu variety spoken in Kitagwenda District, Southwestern Uganda. With the help of the qualitative data collected from sixteen native speakers, the researchers carry out ample identification and analysis of the tense and aspectual categories in Rutagwenda. Using a descriptive design, the study found that Rutagwenda encodes three primary tenses (past, present, future) with multiple remoteness distinctions, and exhibits both perfective and imperfective aspects with rich subcategorization, with the help of key distinctions in the use of auxiliaries, tone, and morphological markers set Rutagwenda. This article contributes to African linguistics by documenting the grammatical structure of a minority and less or undocumented languages in Africa.