Introduction

This paper discusses the expression of tense, mood and aspect in Bishnupriya. Bishnupriya is a contact language, which emerged as a result of interaction between two typologically distinct systems, namely the Indo- Aryan (particularly varieties of Eastern Bengali) and the Tibeto-Burman (particularly Meitei). It is spoken in the southern part of Assam, parts of Tripura, Manipur and Bangladesh. This study is based on natural speech data drawn from a Bishnupriya settlement in southern Assam.

The present study has been carried out in the modern sociolinguistic framework by drawing data from natural and casual speech. The data were elicited in the form of interviews following the Labovian model of linguistic variation and change, and were gathered over a period of two months by the author. A total of eight speakers were interviewed, resulting in about 10.5 hours of speech. The examples cited here are from running texts.

Tense, Aspect and Mood: Definitions

Bhat (1999a) has argued that a typological classification of languages as tense prominent, mood prominent or aspect prominent can be made based upon the relative degree of prominence that a language attributes to one or other of these verbal categories. The ‘degree of prominence’ can be determined by a set of characteristics and co-relational morpho-syntactic characteristics reflected by these languages. According to Comrie (1976), the tense locates the time of an event or a situation in relation to a reference point, that is an event occurring before or after or simultaneous with the reference point, whereas aspect expresses the internal temporal structure of an event.