While the verbs in 2a and 3a show noun class agreement with. This word order difference is correlated with a difference in agreement. Bantu, syntax, bantu languages, morphology, information structure, word order. The shona bantu word simba, can be used as a verb or noun simba means, be strong, healthy, powerful. Reasons for the bantu migration the reasons for the migration of the bantu are not known but they most likely included the following. Introduction unmarked word order in bantu languages is svo with the subject triggering obligatory agreement on the verb. The disjunctive versus conjunctive writing systems in the south african bantu languages have direct implications for word class tagging. For example, the prefix ba and the suffix ntu was common among the languages they spoke. Many bantu languages are exceptional in this respect in that they have a lot of freedom in the mutual ordering of postnominal modifiers see below. The acquisition of bantu languages katherine demuth brown. The noun class system is part of a much larger inflectional agreement system that permeates most bantu languages. Directional asymmetries in the morphology and phonology of. Austin and others published word order in a free word order language. What the bantu languages can tell us about word order and movement leston c.
The nilosaharan languages are presumed to be descended from a common ancestral language and, therefore, to be genetically related. In the search for a universal theory of syntax, the crosslinguistic comparison of word order variation is a key area to be investigated. Because of their agglutinative nature, syntax in bantu languages is always on the boundary with. Disambiguation of morphological analysis in bantu languages arvi hurskainen department of asian and african studies box 00014 university of helsinki finland arvi.
In 2b and 3b, however, the subjects follow their verbs. Linguistic ties between ancient egyptian and bantu x not generally the case in the ancient egyptian language. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes including stems and affixes remain, in every aspect, unchanged after their unions. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of two types of word level asymmetries and their interaction. Kiango university of dar es salaam, tanzania abstract the headword of a dictionary entry serves different functions. The syntax of agreement in bantu relatives brent henderson 1 the typology of bantu relatives many linguists have found bantu relative clauses interesting for two reasons. All members of a given class share the same prefix. The first of the overt coding properties is word order. Despite this i argue that a closest ccommand based account chomsky 2000 is superior to a spechead agreement analysis, for two reasons. This paper offers an introduction to the basic morphosyntax of the bantu languages, in the context of issues related to the investigation of movement and word order in this large and diverse group. This chapter provides an overview of the common syntactic features as well as the syntactic microvariation found in the bantu languages. Additionally, however, polysynthetic languages may have words with multiple stems in a single word which are not compounds. The climate in their cradle land had become unreliableunpredictable.
At the time, african languages were classified into five families. While the first asymmetry will be examined via examples from different languages, the bantu family of ca. However, not in all languages are verb agreement, word order, or case determined by semantic or grammatical roles as we know them. Disambiguation of morphological analysis in bantu languages. There are no written records of the original language.
Agreement properties and word order in comparative bantu. Had sir alan gardiner referred to bantu languages he would not have chosen salima. This word order difference is easily characterized given the architec ture in 11 by assuming that the relative complementizer in zulu may ap pear either as the head of finp or the head of forcep. Unmarked word order in bantu languages is svo with the subject triggering obligatory agreement on the verb. An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. The bantoid languages are a body of some 150 to 200 languages positioned geographically between nigeria and cameroun. Included are those languages that constitute at least 1% of the population and have at least 10% the number of speakers of the largest bantu language in the country. If we consider word stems in bantu languages, what. What the bantu languages can tell us about word order and. Most bantu languages have tones which serve to make lexical andor grammatical distinctions. Polysynthetic languages often display a high degree of affixation high number of morphemes per word and fusion of morphemes, like agglutinative and fusional languages. Bantu definition, a member of any of several peoples forming a linguistically and in some respects culturally interrelated family in central and southern africa. Greater flexibility in word order in the african languages as compared to english is made possible through 1. In some of these languages, however, both object agreement.
In favour of the tree model, bantu languages are thought to have spread and diversi. Bantu languages show svo word order, agglutinative verb structure, and nearly all are tone languages with swahili being an exception. Nilosaharan languages, a group of languages that form one of the four language stocks or families on the african continent, the others being afroasiatic, khoisan, and nigercongo. Twelve bantu languages are spoken by more than five million people, including rundi, rwanda, shona, xhosa, and zulu. Many of the african peoples who became participants in the slave trade shared a common cultural bond in their linguistic origins. Word order and information structure in makhuwaenahara lot.
One is a kind of v2 effect found in relative clauses, but not in main clauses, which in many languages requires inversion of the verb and the. Greenbergs first major work was the genetic classification of the languages of africa, published in serialized form in the southwestern journal of anthropologyein 194950. A brief summary of the bantu acquisition literature by language is provided below. In other words, in s1 relatives, a heads finp while in s2 relatives it heads forcep. Introduction among phoneticians, the bantu languages have a reputation as not having many interesting features with the exception of the clicks introduced in some languages of the southern area. If we consider word stems in bantu languages, what one observes is that each word consists of an. The information structure is an influential factor in this language, determining the word order and the use of special conjugations known as conjoint and disjoint verb forms. Unlike many bantu languages, the locative noun class prefixes classes 16, 17 and 18 in sesotho have been largely lexicalized and, with the slight exception of class 17 ho are no longer productive see demuth 1989c. The smallest unit that can be utilised by a rule is the word as it is contained in the lexicon.
They moved due to the fear of famine, which broke out due to overcrowding and drought. Semitic, hamitic, sudanic, bantu and bushman newman 1995. Although in other germanic languages, the embedded clause word order is svo. To illustrate this, look at the table below which shows translations of the word person and people into some zambian bantu languages. Bantu languages lack the operation of regular sound shifts. What the bantu languages can tell us about word order and movement. They are spoken south of a line from nigeria across the central african republic, the democratic republic of congo, uganda, kenya to southern somalia. Variation in the expression of information structure in eastern bantu. I demonstrate that the correlation between sv word order and subject agreement observed in zulu and many other bantu languages can be explained on the. As in all bantu languages, the np in ikalanga that bears the subject relation normally pre cedes the verb, as shown in l. An attempt at a full list of bantu languages with various conflations and a puzzlingly diverse nomenclature can be found in the bantu languages of africa, 1959. Introduction 3 eastern bantu languages based on sound morphosyntactic principles cf. The canonical word order in bantu is svo, and the subjects in the a.
It particularly highlights the importance of information structure for the analysis of morphosyntax in this language family. Schadeberg 143 1 introduction 143 2 proto bantu reconstructions 146. Swahili, which is spoken by five million people as a mother tongue and some 30 million as a second language, is a bantu lingua franca important in both commerce and literature. There is also a morphological slot within the verb template for object marking, though this is optional in most constructions, depending on the language. Introduction the aim of this article is to draw a comparison of approaches towards word class tagging in two orthographically distinct bantu languages. Prominence mismatches and differential object marking in bantu. However, his works concentrated on the nguni languages, while concerning the. The structure of the bantu noun phrase researchgate. Word order on lower levels tends to be much stricter crosslinguistically, even in socalled discourse configurational languages such as russian. Morphologythe most distinctive morphological feature of bantu languages is the grouping of nouns in different classes, marked by a prefix. Project description bantu syntax and information structure. They do not form a genetic group but all are in some way more closely related than to bantu than other branches of benuecongo.
Despite significant typological similarities, eastern bantu languages differ in how informa tion structure is. Computational morphological analysers and machinereadable. Third, bantu languages are socalled prodrop languages. The word bantu mainly refers to the linguistic classification of more than 200 different african languages. Nkadzi wa lob a nlume woman i smipasthit fv manl the woman hit the man. Thus, a comparison of the acquisition of bantu languages offers an extremely rich area for research, providing insights not only into how language is learned, but also into the possible impact that language learning may exert on processes of historical change.
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