Retrospective 'Tun'

The word tun is a special one that I will call the retrospective marker.

It is retrospective because it allows you to place a proposition in the past.

Non-Verbal Sentences

The area where this is most apparent is with non-verbal sentences (e.g., presentatives, qualitatives, equatives and situatives).

Such sentences do not have normal verbs that can be "conjugated" via predicate markers such bɛ/tɛ or ye/ma or the suffix -ra/la/na.

Let's take a situative sentence like N bɛ Bamakɔ, for instance:

N bɛ Bamakɔ

'I am in Bamako'

You can't put it into the past by adding ye or -ra/la-na like you would with a normal verb:

N ye bɛ Bamakɔ / N bɛra Bamakɔ

'I was in Bamako'

To put N bɛ Bamakɔ in the past, you need to use the retrospective marker tun.

You do this by placing tun right before the copula (that is, the main verb-like word). For instance:

N bɛ Bamakɔ → N tun bɛ Bamakɔ

'I am in Bamako' → 'I was in Bamako'

This same principe applies across all of the non-verbal sentence types. For example:

• Presentatives

  Sara don
  "It's Sara"

  →

  Sara tun don
  "It was Sara"

• Equatives

  I ye kalanden ye
  'You are a student'

  →

  I tun ye kalanden ye
  'You were a student'

• Qualitative Verbs

  Dumuni ka di
  'The food is good'

  →

  Dumuni tun ka di
  'The food was good'

Things are the same when the sentences are negative. For instance:

N tɛ Bamakɔ
"I'm not in Bamako"

→

N tun tɛ Bamakɔ
"I wasn't in Bamako"

Verbal Sentences

The word tun can also be applied to sentences with normal verbs. When this happens, it puts in the action into the past.

(NOTE: For this reason, many linguists do not consider the verbal predicate markers like bɛ/tɛ, ye/ma or -ra/la/na as markers of present and past. Instead, they are markers of "aspect". This is a fancy way of referring to whether something is complete or not. You might find it helpful to conceptualize predicate markers like ye/ma, -ra/la/na and bɛ/tɛ as marking "complete/incomplete" instead of "past/present".)

Let's take a basic sentences in the present tense. For example:

N bɛ taa

"I go"

When adding tun to this sentence, we place it right before the predicate marker. And the effect is of putting the event in the past (but not changing its "completeness"). For instance:

N tun bɛ taa

This "tense" (that is, the combination of bɛ/tɛ and tun), which we might call the "incomplete past" tense, covers at least three different usages in English:

• Past Description

  For instance:

  N tun bɛ taa Bamakɔ…

  "I was going to Bamako…" (when such-and-such thing happened to me)

• Habitual Past Actions

  For instance:

  N tun bɛ taa Bamakɔ…

  "I would go to Bamako…" (every year when I was little)

• "Should have"

  For instance:

  I tun b'à fɔ!

  "You should have said it"
  (Lit. "You were saying it!")

(NOTE: In French, this use of tun creates the equivalent of what is known as the "imparfait" [imperfect].)

(NOTE: While the word tun marks events in the past in ways that line up with European languages like English and French, its usage is not always required. When people tell stories or recount events, it often may only appear initially at the beginning to signal that the narrated event occurred in the past. So do not be surprised if it's not as prevalent as you would expect if you are translating things from a European language.)

As you can see, the predicate markers bɛ/tɛ is more about "incompleteness" than the "the past". As such, predicate markers like ye/ma and -ra/la/na are more about "completeness". For this reason, we can easily combine tun with them as well.

For instance, let's take a basic "incomplete" sentence with ye:

N ye Adama fo

"I greeted Adama"

When we add tun to this sentence, the event is placed into the past:

N tun ye Adama fo

This "tense" (which we might call the "complete past") typically expresses the following in English:

• "had + VERB"

  For instance:

  N tun ye Adama fo

  "I had greeted Adama" (and then something else happened.)

Verbal Sentences "in the Future"

The word tun can also appear in sentences with the future predicate markers bɛna/tɛna or na/tɛna.

These can be translated into a range of forms in English depending on the context.

For instance, into "be going to" (AKA "future in the past") sentences:

N tun bɛna taa

"I was going to go" (but something came up)

They can also be used in counterfactual conditionals:

N'i tun ye baara kɛ, i tun bɛna wari sɔrɔ

"If you had worked, you would have gotten money"
Lit. "If you had worked, you were going to earn money"

Separated from the predicate marker

Tun generallys appear directly before a predicate marker or copula. For instance:

N sen tun t'à la

"My foot wasn't in it"
(as in, "I wasn't involved")

But tun can also separated from the predicate marker if it appears within a noun phrase that is the subject of the sentence. For instance:

N tun sen t'à la

"My foot wasn't in it"

(as in, "I wasn't involved")