Aspectual Coercion in Afaan Oromoo

Abstract

Eventuality is loosely defined as a state-of-affair in the encyclopedic world. It is linguistically represented or
denoted by verbs, verb phrases, clauses and sentences, and is temporally categorized into situation aspect
and viewpoint aspect. Whereas the former deals with the features of predicates, the latter is determined to
the perspective or view of speakers towards a specific state-of-affair. Aspectual coercion in relation to
eventuality or situation aspects refers to the modification or alteration of the temporal and aspectual
properties of a verb or predicate based on the context or syntactic structure of a sentence, impacting how the
eventuality or situation is interpreted or expressed. This phenomenon occurs when the aspectual
interpretation of a verb is coerced to align with the requirements of the sentence's occurrence or happening.
The main purpose of this study is to present linguistic factors which trigger situation aspects to be shifted or
coerced into derived ones in Afaan Oromoo. The study relies on the fundamental distinction between
situation and viewpoint aspects proposed by Dowty (1979), and modified in Role and Reference Grammar of Van Valin and LaPolla (1997) as well as the two-component theory of Smith (1997). The results indicate that adverbials of (a) telic extents shift one type of situation aspect, such as activity, to derived ones (e.g., accomplishment). In addition, spatial adjuncts co-occur with clauses of situations in the coercion process. Not only these, the co-occurrence of quantized or cumulative internal argument with a clause coerces/shifts a situation into another. Altogether, the coerced situation aspects reveal semantic notions which are distinguished from prototypical situation aspects.