The Basse Mandinka "future"

The present paper provides a detailed analysis of the semantic content of the BE…LA formation found in the Basse Mandinka language. It demonstrates that the meaning of this locution corresponds to a complex set of various temporal, aspectual and modal senses: perfective and imperfective future, future perfect, future-in-the-past, intentional future, future with imperative and prohibitive nuances, real factuality as well as real and unreal counterfactuality. The semantic potential of the construction composed of all the atomic values is explained as a consistent whole, i.e., as a manifestation of three typologically plausible evolutionary scenarios: future predestination path, conditional path and modal contamination path.