Towards a Unified Theory of Hausa Verbal Aspect: Rethinking Aspect-Tense Interaction in Chadic Languages

Hausa presents a distinctive verbal aspect system that has been described in divergent and sometimes contradictory terms in the existing literature, reflecting underlying theoretical disputes about the relationship between aspect, tense, and mood in Chadic languages. This doctoral study advances a unified theoretical account of Hausa verbal aspect, contributing an original theoretical framework that resolves existing descriptive controversies and situates Hausa within broader typological debates on aspect in Afro-Asiatic languages. Grounded in formal semantic theory and typological linguistics, the research employs an extensive multi-method corpus and experimental design. A corpus of 50,000 words of naturalistic Hausa speech from five regional varieties was assembled and annotated for aspect, temporality, and modality marking. Event plausibility judgement experiments, truth value judgement tasks, and forced choice elicitation studies were conducted with 120 native speakers across four dialect areas. Cross-linguistic comparison with documented aspect systems in other Chadic languages was incorporated. Original theoretical contributions include a Hausa Aspect Decomposition Model that distinguishes viewpoint aspect, situation aspect, and temporal anchoring as three interacting but distinct grammatical subsystems, each with its own morphological realisations in Hausa. The model predicts previously unanalysed interactions between aspectual and modal forms and generates testable empirical predictions verified against the corpus data. The study challenges established analyses of Hausa TAM that treat aspect and tense as fused rather than compositional, contributing to both Hausa grammar and Afro-Asiatic language typology. Keywords: Hausa verbal aspect, Tense-aspect interaction, Chadic languages, Formal semantics, Typology.