A Hausa grade change can reorganize an event’s participants. Compare Shugabar ta tara ma’aikatan “The manager gathered the employees” with Ma’aikatan sun taru “The employees assembled.” The related verbs tara and taru do not differ in tense: the first selects an actor and a direct object, while the second makes the assembling group the subject and licenses no direct object.
This page treats the syntax of such alternations rather than the full form and tone paradigm of any grade; the paired-grade guide develops the advanced morphology. All unlabelled examples are (neutral Nigerian Standard Hausa). Grade, valency, causer, patient, and resultative are (academic) terms. Ordinary boko preserves ɓ, ɗ, ƙ and apostrophes but does not write tone or vowel length; some related verbs therefore look more alike in writing than they sound.
Begin with the participants, not the ending
The safest analysis asks three questions: Who is the subject? Does the verb license a direct object? Which participant undergoes the change? A neutral transitive clause retains S–TAM–V–O order:
Shugabar ta tara sabbin ma’aikatan a zaure.
The manager gathered the new employees in the hall. (neutral transitive order)
The subject shugabar controls feminine singular ta. The affected group sabbin ma’aikatan follows transitive tara as its direct object. With intransitive Grade 7 taru, that group becomes the subject:
Sabbin ma’aikatan sun taru a zaure.
The new employees assembled in the hall. (intransitive Grade 7)
Plural sun now agrees with sabbin ma’aikatan. There is no empty organizer position that must be filled, and the clause need not imply that anybody gathered them. English the employees were gathered may suggest a passive agent, but Hausa sun taru can simply describe coordinated assembling.
Three frequent kinds of alternation
The following map is useful, but each pair is still a lexical fact.
| Relationship | Transitive member | Intransitive or basic member |
|---|---|---|
| actor versus assembling group | tara mutane “gather people” | mutane sun taru “people assembled” |
| cause versus change of state | faɗaɗa hanya “widen a road” | hanya ta faɗaɗa “a road widened” |
| compact causative versus basic event | fitar da baƙo “take a visitor out” | baƙo ya fita “a visitor went out” |
| actor versus affected result | gyara mota “repair a car” | mota ta gyaru “a car improved/got repaired” |
Hukumar birni ta faɗaɗa hanyar domin rage cunkoso.
The city authority widened the road to reduce congestion. (transitive member)
Hanyar ta faɗaɗa bayan an sake gina gadar.
The road became wider after the bridge was rebuilt. (intransitive member)
Ordinary boko writes the two faɗaɗa forms alike, but their technical tone patterns and their syntax distinguish them. In the first clause hukumar birni causes a change and hanyar is an object. In the second, hanyar undergoes the change as subject and controls feminine ta.
Grade 5 often adds a causer and a direct-result reading. Its long object construction normally uses da:
Baƙon ya fita daga ɗakin taro da ƙarfe biyar.
The visitor left the meeting room at five. (basic intransitive fita)
Mai gadi ya fitar da baƙon daga ɗakin taro da ƙarfe biyar.
The guard took the visitor out of the meeting room at five. (transitive Grade 5)
The visitor changes from subject of fita to affected object after fitar da. Do not interpret da here as English with or as a passive by phrase; it belongs to the long Grade 5 object frame.
Grade 7 commonly reverses the perspective by profiling an affected result:
Makanikin ya gyara motar bayan ya samo sabon famfo.
The mechanic repaired the car after finding a new pump.
Motar ta gyaru bayan an canja famfon.
The car improved / got repaired after the pump was replaced.
Ta gyaru need not assert who repaired the vehicle. Some Grade 7 verbs support a passive-like reading; others are anticausative, reciprocal, intensive, or lexicalized. The robust A2 fact is narrower: the Grade 7 member is intransitive, and its affected participant is the grammatical subject.
Grade does not mean tense
The same member can appear in several TAM frames. Changing TAM does not switch tara into taru, and changing grade does not locate an event in time.
| Frame | Transitive tara | Intransitive taru |
|---|---|---|
| completed | Shugabar ta tara su. | Sun taru. |
| continuative | Shugabar tana tara su. | Suna taruwa. |
| future | Shugabar za ta tara su. | Za su taru. |
The preverbal forms ta, tana, za ta, sun, suna, za su carry agreement and TAM. The lexical contrast tara/taru determines valency and perspective. English tense endings do neither job in the same way, so a word-for-word auxiliary calque is unreliable.
Negatives and questions preserve the selected valency
A negative does not restore a missing object to an intransitive member:
Ma’aikatan ba su taru a zauren ba.
The employees did not assemble in the hall.
Here ma’aikatan remains the plural subject, su occurs inside the completed negative frame, and final ba closes it. An ordinary polar question keeps the same argument structure:
Ma’aikatan sun taru a zauren?
Did the employees assemble in the hall?
Hausa does not add English did. To ask who gathered the employees, choose the transitive member because the unknown participant is the actor:
Wa ya tara ma’aikatan a zauren?
Who gathered the employees in the hall?
The choice between tara and taru is therefore logically prior to question formation: first decide the participant structure, then choose the Hausa question construction.
Reordering cannot manufacture an alternation
Fronting an affected participant does not turn a transitive verb into its intransitive grade partner. It creates an information-structure construction while preserving the participant’s role.
Shugabar ta tara ma’aikatan da safe.
The manager gathered the employees in the morning. (neutral S–TAM–V–O)
Ma’aikatan ne shugabar ta tara da safe, ba baƙi ba.
It was the employees that the manager gathered in the morning, not the visitors. (object focus)
In the focused sentence, ma’aikatan is still the object of tara. Ne licenses the focus, and the finite clause uses the appropriate relative-completive form; feminine singular ta looks the same as its plain counterpart in ordinary boko, although the pronunciation differs. Replacing tara with taru would produce a different predicate in which the employees are subject.
A left-edge topic uses resumption instead:
Ma’aikatan kuwa, shugabar ta tara su da safe.
As for the employees, the manager gathered them in the morning. (topic plus resumptive su)
The resumptive su preserves the object role. Hausa does not permit learners to move the noun freely and hope that word order alone tells the listener whether it is subject or object.
A short discourse motivates the marked order
—Shugabar ta tara baƙi? —A’a, ma’aikatan ne ta tara. Da suka gama taron, ma’aikatan sun taru a ƙofar zauren.
—Did the manager gather the visitors? —No, it was the employees she gathered. When they finished the meeting, the employees assembled at the hall entrance.
The correction fronts ma’aikatan as the object of transitive tara. The final clause then chooses intransitive taru because the employees themselves assemble. The discourse demonstrates why superficially related clauses cannot be produced by random word-order changes.
Lexical limits are real
The patterns are productive enough to be useful but not automatic enough to invent forms. Hausa may use unrelated roots, as with mutu “die” and kashe “kill.” Established grade relatives can also acquire conventional meanings: saya “buy” and Grade 5 sayar da “sell” are not transparent opposites produced online from a general suffix rule.
There is no safe shortcut. Learn an alternation as a set: the form, its subject, any direct object, its usual meaning, and its continuative verbal noun. A familiar consonantal shape is evidence to investigate, not permission to coin a verb.
Common Mistakes
1. Keeping a direct object after an intransitive member
❌ Daraktan ya taru ma’aikatan a zaure.
Incorrect—taru is intransitive and cannot take ma’aikatan as a direct object.
✅ Daraktan ya tara ma’aikatan a zaure.
The director gathered the employees in the hall.
2. Treating a grade change as past tense
❌ Taru ita ce sigar lokacin da ya wuce ta tara.
Incorrect—taru and tara contrast valency, not tense.
✅ Gobe ma’aikatan za su taru da ƙarfe goma.
Tomorrow the employees will assemble at ten.
3. Omitting subject–TAM marking after the new subject
❌ Motar gyaru bayan an canja famfon.
Incorrect finite clause—the feminine subject motar still requires ta.
✅ Tsohuwar motar ta gyaru bayan kwana biyu a wajen makaniki.
The old car improved after two days at the mechanic’s workshop.
4. Mixing focus with resumptive topic syntax
❌ Ma’aikatan ne shugabar ta tara su da safe.
Incorrect canonical focus—the resumptive su fills the object gap again.
✅ Ma’aikatan ne shugabar ta tara da safe.
It was the employees that the manager gathered in the morning.
Particleless fronted focus can also be licensed by discourse and relative TAM, although singular ta does not visibly distinguish the paradigm in ordinary boko. A detached topic instead uses kuwa and a resumptive su.
5. Inventing a grade partner mechanically
❌ Kowane fi’ili yana da abokin aji da za a iya hango daga ƙarshensa.
Incorrect claim—grade partners and their meanings are lexical facts.
✅ Dokin ya mutu, amma ba wanda ya kashe shi.
The horse died, but nobody killed it. (different lexical roots)
Key Takeaways
- A grade alternation can add a causer, remove an actor, or promote an affected participant to subject.
- The subject controls its own subject–TAM marker; an intransitive partner cannot retain the transitive member’s direct object.
- Grade and TAM are separate: tara/taru selects argument structure, while preverbal forms locate and frame the event.
- Focus fronting and topic resumption preserve grammatical roles; they do not create a new valency alternation.
- Learn attested pairs and their meanings rather than generating grade relatives by analogy.
Related Topics
- Paired Grades and Valency AlternationC1 — Analyze transitive–intransitive and causative–result pairs by tracking participant roles, grade form, and the lexical limits of each alternation.
- Grade 3 and Change of StateB2 — Use Grade 3's strong change-of-state tendency without mistaking it for a universal meaning or a productive English-style derivation.
- Grade 5 Causatives: OverviewB2 — Understand Grade 5 as an all-high transitive extension with causative, transfer, and outward-result meanings—not a universal translation of English make.
- Grade 7 IntransitivityB2 — Use Grade 7 only with an affected or participating subject, distinguishing direct objects from licensed prepositional complements and adjuncts.
- Direct Objects after the VerbA2 — Place neutral Hausa direct objects after the verb, and distinguish that basic order from licensed questions, focus, topics, and object omission.
- Basic S–TAM–V–O Word OrderA1 — Build neutral Hausa clauses with a subject, a subject–TAM marker, a verb, and an object in their normal order.