Two Types of Temporal When Clauses in Hausa

Abstract

Hausa has simple temporal clauses, introduced by the conjunction dà ‘when’, that many researchers derive from temporal relative clauses introduced by lookàcin dà ‘time that’, through the deletion of the pseudo head word lookàcii ‘time’. This paper shows that this analysis, however natural it may appear, is inadequate. Indeed, the two temporal clauses have different uses, which would not be surprising if simple temporal clauses are derivationally independent from temporal relative clauses, as proposed in this paper