Tense and aspect in Kurdish

Abstract

The present paper aims at investigating the tense system and its relationship to the aspectual system in Mukriyan Kurdish language. For this purpose, we analyze the tense system in the Mukriyan Kurdish language, and then evaluate its influences on the grammatical and situational aspects. The results show that the Mukriyan Kurdish language has a binary tense system (past and non-past). The combination of this system with modal and aspectual markers gives rise to various conceptions of time that are not necessarily enjoying a grammatical coding. For example, the combination of this tense system with the mood markers gives birth to future and posterior times. Also, the results demonstrate that the present tense can be mainly combined with the imperfect aspect, whereas the past tense is the most unmarked tense for the perfect aspect. In addition, all the lexical aspects may easily be expressed in the past tense, but many of them suffer coercion in the present tense. It should be noted that expressing the perfect aspect in present tense is possible in some situations including imperative sentences and sport report.

Keywords

• tense
• view point aspect
• situation type
• perfect
• kurdish language