The -ag- morpheme in kingwana

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to describe morphosyntactically the morphological constituent -ag(a) attested in the verbal structure of kingwana. An analysis approach based on combinatorial morphological morphology was applied to sentences collected in the city of Bujumbura. Our study reached three results. First, the morphological complex -ag(a) consists of the final vowel -a and the morpheme -ag- which is placed in the pre-final position after all verbal extensions. Second, -ag- is an inflectional morpheme with the semantic value of the imperfective aspect covering both the contextual values of the habitual, the iterative and the durative. Finally, this imperfective aspect -ag- contrasts with the perfective aspect -meisha- and attributes to the Kingwana the characteristics of an aspect-tense language.