In Guinean Maninka, there is a specialized affirmative perfect construction whose core grammatical semantics is constituted by the meanings of actual past, experiential, and perfect in the past. In negative sentences, the opposition of the perfect and aorist is neutralized. In interrogative sentences, the meaning of actual past is normally expressed by the aorist construction. The perfect construction can also express resultative and inferential meanings competing with the specialized resultative and inferential constructions. The auxiliary of the perfect construction, báda ~ bára, results from grammaticalization of the verb bán ‘to end, finish’ in Maninka; it was borrowed later by the languages of the Mokolo and Susu-Jallonke groups.