ABSTRACT
Authors have been writing about verbs in Bantu languages for well over a century. Literally thousands of works deal in one way or other with the topic. The authors have had a range of purposes and backgrounds, and what they wrote varies in length from a few lines to a huge volume. At the risk of overgeneralization, most of this work has been concerned with the structures, and, more recently, with the tones, of aspects, tenses, and moods. It has dealt much less well with the semantics of these verbal categories, and with how they fit together in a coherent morphosemantic system for each language. The emphasis in what follows is to start to deal with the semantics, drawing on contemporary general linguistic theory (Bybee et al. 1994, Comrie 1976, 1985, Dahl 1985), and the systems involved. Once the structures (including tones), the categories, their semantics, and the overall system have been established for each language, a later step will be to establish the pragmatics, how the categories are used in practice.
