UCLA

I report on fieldwork and offer a survey of the temporal system of Foto Dschang (Grassfields Bantu), taking as its starting point Hyman’s early (1980) study of Dschang tense. Dschang is a language which exhibits an elaborate system of graded temporal distinctions. In this thesis, I begin by presenting some background on the language and the methodology for data collection in this project. I then present an overview of temporal configurations found in the language – those for past, future, as well as present and other aspectual forms, together with a number of their key morphosyntactic properties and interactions with negation. The final section concludes with desiderata for future work to stem from this project.