The main purpose of this work is to present the nature of temporal relations in the Amharic language on the basis of a text corpus. My analysis starts from defining the functions of the finite and infinite verb forms which construct an Amharic complex sentence, depending on the type of the conjunction. I also describe the ways of locating an event in time, as well as of determining a sequence of events. In Chapter 5 I analyse intentional sentences and the sequence of tenses phenomena in Amharic. In Chapter 6 I present temporal relations in semantically conjuncted sentences: paratactic as well as hypotactic. The results of my analysis show most comprehensively the possible temporal relations in an Amharic sentence, taking into consideration the morphosyntactic characteristics and requirements of the relations. In the Annex, I provide a list of nearly 300 sentence schemata derived from the text corpus of more than 1000 utterances and arranged according to the final verb form, which show the possible chains of verbal forms and conjunctions with respect to the number of elements.

llykowska@uw.edu.pl