Tenses

Qohenje has two full tenses, marked with a verbal auxiliary:

• Present [PRS]: predicating a relation which is coincident with the speech-act.
• Non-Present (Past) [PST]: predicating in its most basic realisation a relation which occurred prior to the speech act, and which is part of the direct personal experience of the speaker.

In addition, the language has two further tense specifications with periphrastic structures:

• Distal [DST]: predicating a relation which is either,
  1. assumed or accepted as having taken place in the distant past, outside of the speaker’s direct personal experience, or
  2. assumed or accepted as having taken place (in the past), far from the current physical location of the speaker;
• Future [FUT]: predicating a relation which is fully expected in the experiencable future

Included in the list of tense morphemes are the two Qohenje imperatives,

• Jussive [JUS]: for positive orders,
• Prohibitive [PRH]: for prohibitions (negative commands)
  

The respective auxiliary forms are as follows. (All the verbal auxiliaries are ligatures - they do not take a cejhan after them).

 

 

 

 

 

Tense auxiliaries come immediatly before the lexeme that they verbalize, (although they can be separated by an ATT adverb, q.v.), forming a verbal unit:

 

The periphrastic tenses

Qohenje DST formations take the form of a nominalised AB-AX clause as the LM of the pseudo-verbal (DPSTVb) which itself only occurs with the PST auxiliary. This lexeme has no "meaning" as such: it is invariable, and only serves in this kind of periphrastic tense structure.

The Qohenje FUT is also of this kind, although it is formed with the pseudo-verbal (FUTVb) , which looks a lot like the NOR form of the verb to see - . Native Qohenje speakers do not think of this as part of the verb to see, however, and treat it like an invariable. takes PRS auxiliaries.

Note that neither of these formations take an overt LM clitic.

Imperatives (jussives and prohibitives)

If they appear without a TR argument, the JUS and PRH are understood as 2nd person imperatives. They may also take an overt 1st person TR to become HORTATIVES (positive/negative).

 

The difference between the concrete and the abstract imperatives can be seen in the following examples:

 

Using JUS with a negated verb is a more immediate way of attempting to halt a process that is already committed or apparently certain,

The JUS and PRH auxiliaries only occur with NOR aspect lexemes and are invariably Abstract in sense:

 

Narrative structure

In long non-present discourses, the Echo auxiliary is normally employed to avoid repeating the auxiliary. This particle is like a proform which echoes exactly the last overt auxiliary used. If there is any change in specification (mood, tense or animacy), the new auxiliary must be expressed in full.
There is in addition another form, the Present Insert Auxiliary , which serves to jump the temporal ground back to the present for the clause in which it occurs, allowing it to return to the previous specification afterwards (usually with ). This auxiliary is particularly used to insert comments into long non-present narratives.

These are mainly spoken forms, and are rarely written. When they do appear in writing, it is usually with the following ligatures (although they are also sometimes found written in full) :