The Factative Effect in Avatime

The Factative Effect (Welmers 1973) is a phenomenon found in many African languages whereby a single aspectual category, often labeled the factative, seemingly has a past perfective usage with dynamic predicates and a present imperfective usage with stative predicates. Despite its prevalence, this pattern has received little theoretical attention. In this talk, I provide a description and partial analysis of the Factative Effect in Avatime, a Ghana-Togo Mountain language spoken in Ghana, based on novel fieldwork data. I argue that apparently stative predicates in Avatime encode a complex event structure composed of a change-of-state event and a subsequent target state. Such a representation lets us account for their behavior across a range of environments, including in the factative aspect. Avatime therefore gives us a window into the semantics of lexical and grammatical aspect and their cross-linguistic variation.