Oceanic Linguistics, Volume 46, no. 2 (December 2007) ' by University of Hawaii Press. All rights reserved. Imperfective Aspect and the Interplay of Aspect, Tense, and Modality in Torau Bill Palmer university of surrey Torau displays a highly complex system of aspect, tense, and modal mark- ing. One of the most complex elements of this system is the marking of imperfective aspect. Imperfective in Torau is marked by a construction employing a choice of two overt imperfective markers and the possible pres- ence of reduplication. The range of imperfective semantics encoded by this construction varies widely, encompassing progressive, habitual, persistive, and progressive inchoative or inceptive. Which reading is given depends not only on the choice of imperfective marker and the presence or absence of reduplication, but on a complex interplay of these factors with other aspec- tual, modal, or tense marking, and the aspectual semantics of the verb itself. This paper teases apart each of these highly interdependent factors to deter- mine the independent functional characteristics of each imperfective marker and of reduplication. 1. THE IMPERFECTIVE CONSTRUCTION IN TORAU. 1 Torau is a member of the Northwest Solomonic (NWS) subgroup of Western Oceanic, one of three languages within the Mono-Uruavan subgroup of NWS that also includes Mono-Alu and the now extinct Uruava (Ross 1988:215). Torau is spoken by about 1,200 individuals in three vil- lages on the east coast of Bougainville: Vito, Tarara, and Rorovana (with its subvillages Amata Geesi Big Village, also known as Rorovana 1, and Sivilnai or Rorovana 2). Torau marks imperfective aspect using a construction unique to NWS (Ross 1982, Palmer to appear). In this construction, found in all NWS ²rst-order subgroups except Choiseul, postverbal particles or enclitics index one of the core arguments, typically the nominative subject (i.e., the A or S). Across NWS this construction assigns a particular aspectual status to the clause, typically imperfective, or some subtype of imperfective such as continuous, progressive, or durative. The morphology carrying this function is either identical to that used in adnominal indirect possessor-indexing constructions in that language, or is historically derived from former possessor-indexing morphology. 1. The support of UK Arts and Humanities Research Council grant APN19365 in the preparation of this paper is gratefully acknowledged. All Torau data was collected by the author in the ²eld on ²eld trips funded by the same grant. An earlier version of this material was presented at a Surrey Morphology Group features workshop on aspect in May 2007. I am grateful to participants at that workshop for their comments, and for the comments of two anonymous reviewers. All errors remain mine.