Time in Languages of the Horn of Africa

The contributions in this volume emerge from presentations held within the panel "Time in the Languages of the Horn of Africa" at the 19th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (Warsaw, 2015): "Ethiopia - Diversity and Interconnections through Space and Time." The purpose of this panel was to develop a better understanding of time concepts in languages spoken at the Horn of Africa, and to gain new insights into typological and areallinguistic issues related to the expression of time in these languages. Two research topics dominated the presentations: in-depth studies on tense/aspect systems of individual languages, and typological contrastive comparisons of specific tense/aspect features in closely related languages. The first section deals with tense/aspect phenomena in individual mostly Ethio-Semitic languages. Topics are Ge'ez static verbs, Gumer perfective/imperfect aspect, particular parts of the Amharic tense/aspect system (two contributions), and tense/aspect in the Cushitic language Oromo (a non-Ethio-Semitic language). The second section contains three comparative studies of tense/aspect phenomena in various Ethio-Semitic languages.