Perfectives and perfects and pasts, oh my!: On the semantics of -ILE in Bantu

The widespread Bantu verb suffix -ILE manifests a variety of temporal notions across the Bantu domain, ranging from perfective aspect to perfect to past tense. The most common function assigned to -ILE seems to be Perfect (or Anterior in some accounts) marker. In this paper, the author proposes a detailed analysis differentiating perfective and perfect, demonstrating through the analysis of -ILE use in four languages – Luwanga and Lusaamia, and Rutooro and Runyoro– that -ILE is a type of perfective (not perfect !) marker that developed into a tense marker in some languages. The analysis distinguishes resultative from completive perfective uses, showing how the paths of development from earlier stages to the modern languages differed in the two sets of languages, and differ from the developmental path set out by Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca (1994).