A note on modality and aspect in Saramaccan

This article provides a short overview over Saramaccan TMA marking and its modal system and discusses the interaction of modality and aspect. Saramaccan modal markers are stative themselves and therefore do not take durative marking. However, differences appear when modal markers take propositions with divergent temporal-aspectual properties. Especially, it is shown that the uses of the only Saramaccan modal marker which is polyfunctional between root and epistemicity, musu, can be distinguished by their selective properties. Specifically, the epistemic use associates exclusively with stative and durative propositions