ABSTRACT
The basic types of Hausa sentence are few in number. They include I. N N (suunaanaa Audù ‘my name is Audu’), 2. N nee (niinèè ‘it is I’), 3. N nàà N (yanàà zuwà ‘he’s coming’), 4. V-s (baatà na ǹ ‘she’s not here’), 5. p-V (yaa tàfi ‘he went’). Of these 1, 2, 4 and 5 have close parallels in other Afroasiatic (hereinafter AAs) languages: 1 = N N, the nominal equational sentence. This is normally atemporal. See Brockelmann 1961.2.41–102 for Semitic, Edel 1964.476–489 for Egyptian. 2 = N d, noun plus demonstrative. This is discussed as an AAs phenomenon by Hodge 1969. 1 4 = V-s, the common AAs ‘verb’ forms with suffix pronouns. These were apparently originally stative, and this is reflected in the usage of such forms as the Akkadian permansive, the Egyptian Old Perfective (Diakonoff 1965. 78–79, 86–90) and the Hausa forms (Parsons 1960.5, quoted below). Diakonoff fails to recognize the Hausa statives (90). 5 = p-V, the familiar verb prefix forms of AAs, found in some form in all branches (Diakonoff 1965.79–84). There remains 3, which is the subject of the present paper.
