Origin of relative marking in Hausa

38 pagesAlthough the relative marking has been well described for a number of African languages, the issue of its possible sources has so far not been systematically addressed. This paper gives an account of the origin of the relative marking in Hausa and shows that for this purpose, it is necessary to leave aside the typical contexts with which it is usually associated, that is, relative clauses and out-of-focus clauses of constituent focus and wh question constructions. Instead, this paper shows that kèe and kà, in their capacity as Relative Imperfective and Relative Perfective markers, first appeared in scene-setting clauses, i.e., adverbial clauses that carry presupposed information setting the event of the main clause. The paper proposes that the relative marking arose after periphrastic scene-setting clauses of the structure "as it is + clause" underwent clause merger to derive reduced scene-setting clauses with the structure "as + clause". Using grammaticalization theory, the paper, on the one hand, describes some systematic formal constraints on the merger process and, on the other hand, shows that four different types of scene-setting clauses have each a specialized function. These functions, which are the basic information function, expression of speaker-based inference, conveying speaker expressivity, and profiling (emphasis, contrast, and information request), can be cast in an overall grammaticalization scheme involving the scene-setting clauses and their derived constructions, i.e., relative and out-of-focus clauses