This paper discusses the syntax of tense and aspect in Likpakpaanl, a Mabia language spoken in the Northern and Oti regions of Ghana and the Western part of the Republic of Togo. (Manessy, 1971; Tait, 1953). Likpakpaanl displays a system of markers that encode tense/aspect specifications. The aspectual paradigms are perfective, imperfective and habitual. The perfective aspect, which refers to an event with a definite endpoint in time, is unmarked. In contrast, the imperfective aspect, describing an ongoing event, is marked by the preverbal particle ²úì The habitual aspect is expressed using the marker -²Ôì that suffixes the verb.

Tense, on the other hand, is morpho-syntactically expressed using preverbal particles. The past tense is marked using the particles ´Úè ‘a day before’, nán (remote past) ‘two or more days ago’, and ²úá (immediate past) ‘earlier today. The future tense is marked by ²µÃ . Following Cinque (1999) and Tenny (1987), I postulate that aspect is encoded by a syntactic category Aspectual Phrase (AspP) comprising Perfective (PerfP) and Imperfective (ImperfP) and Habitual (HabP). The tense particles in Likpakpaanl are heads of functional categories that project the tense Phrase (TP) (Pollock, 1989). Adopting Chomsky’s (1995) feature-checking theory suggests that aspect and tense markers are the PF realisations of the features [+future], [+habitual], [+imperfective], which are associated with the T° and AsP°, that the verb must check before LF.