The Aorist and the Perfect in Mano

Abstract

The foci of this paper are the semantic differences between two perfective constructions in the Mano language, the Aorist and the Perfect. The paper is based on Östen Dahl's classic questionnaire, as well as various sources of natural speech data, including narratives, routine conversations, and ritual speech, Christian and traditional. The core semantic property of the Mano Perfect is event relevance, which is confirmed by the annulled result test. The core function of the Aorist is being the narrative tense. The paper also includes discussion of two secondary functions of the Perfect and the Aorist, namely, anticipation of future events and transposition to the past. The secondary functions confirm the basic distinction between the Aorist and the Perfect, the latter maintaining a closer connection with the reference point.