1 September 14–17, 2011 3 rd International Conference on Mande Languages & Linguistics (LLACAN, Paris) Maksim Fedotov The category of temporal distance in Gban 1 v Introduction · Temporal distance — or remoteness — markers indicate in the world’s languages the distance in time between two events. Most often it is the distance between the situation expressed by the predicate (E) and the moment of speech (S) (cf. ‘They left the city recently’). Other attested case is markers expressing the distance between E and some reference point (R) (cf. ‘At sunset they had just left the city’). Remoteness systems in different languages also consider differently the objective and subjective factors in judgments of temporal distance (cf. ‘two days ago’, ‘a month ago’, ‘in an hour’… vs. ‘recently’, ‘long ago’, ‘soon’…). v Gban verbal system · Personal markers — free pronouns and predicative pronominal markers (PPMs): 1SG 2SG 3SG 1PL 2PL 3PL Free personal pronouns ӡ̰̀ ɛ̀ɛ̀ (nonopt.); ɛ̏ (subject); ù àà ɔ̏ bȅ (optative) ȁ (nonsubj.) PPMs Nonpast (NPST) ӡ̰̀ / mì / … ɛ̀ɛ̀ / nì / … ɛ̏ / ‶ / yȅ / … ù / wù / … àà ɔ̏ / ‶ / wȍ / … Past (PST) ӡ̰̋ / mӡ̋ / … ɛ̋ɛ̋ / nӡ̋ / … ɛ́ / yë / … ű / wű / … a̋a̋ ɔ́ / wö / … Hesternal past imperfective (PST.HEST.IPFV) ? mìè nìè yȅè wìè ààè wȍè Remote past imperfective (PST.REM.IPFV) ? míé níé yȅé wíé ááé wȍé (the « ? » forms are probably analyzable as «contracted» combinations of a past (nonpast?) form and marker -è <HEST.IPFV> / -é <REM.IPFV>) 1 Gban (Gba ̰́ ) is one of the South Mande languages; it has more than 60 000 native speakers living in the central part of Côte d’Ivoire. Data for this research have been collected during the Saint-Petersburg expedition to Côte d’Ivoire of 2011; data of previous publications on Gban [Zheltov 2002; Howard ms.] were also used. The author would like to thank his assistant, Robert Oya Taki, a Bovo ( Bɔ̏vɔ̏ ) dialect speaker. This study was carried out with the project “Field study of Mande languages of Guinea and Côte-d’Ivoire”, supported by the grant A-07-2011 of the Foundation for Fundamental Linguistic Studies.