Tense, Aspect and Modality (Tam) in the Magar Dhut

Abstract

This study presents a linguistic description of the Magar Dhut, a Tibeto-Burman, Central-Himalayish language belonging to Sino-Tibetan language family, spoken mainly in Nawalparasi district, within the functional-typological framework mainly developed by Talmy Givón (2001) and further supplemented by Noonan (2003), Bhat (2004), Dryer (2006), Dixon (2010) and DeLancey (2012). This is field-based linguistic study. This study mainly focused on the tense, aspect and modality system of the Magar Dhut. The main goal of the study is to analyze the form and functions of tense, aspect and modality at the sentence and discourse level. This study, organized into six chapters, presents the binary tense distinction: past and nonpast

in the language. This language presents both inherent and grammatical aspects. Magar Dhut exhibits four types of inherent aspects: compact, accomplishment, activity and stative. There are two grammatical aspects: perfective and imperfective. Within perfective, it exhibits perfect, past perfective and non-past perfective aspects. There are four types of imperfective aspect: progressive, durative, habitual and prospective. Six types of mood are found in Magar namely indicative, imperative, interrogative, optative, subjunctive and hortative. The language presents both epistemic and evaluative (deontic) modalities. Within epistemic modality, it exhibits probability, certainty, negation and mirativity. Evaluative modality exhibits desirability, ability and obligation. Thus, Magar Dhut is an aspect prominent language.