Relative clauses in Bantu: affixes as relative markers (original) (raw)

Papers from the workshop on Bantu relative clauses

ZAS papers in linguistics, 2010

The papers in this volume were originally presented at the Bantu Relative Clause workshop held in Paris on 8-9 January 2010, which was organized by the French-German cooperative project on the Phonology/Syntax Interface in Bantu Languages (BANTU PSYN). This project, which is funded by the ANR and the DFG, comprises three research teams, based in Berlin, Paris and Lyon. The Berlin team, at the ZAS, is: Laura Downing (project leader) and Kristina Riedel (post-doc). The Paris team, at the Laboratoire de phonétique et phonologie (LPP; UMR 7018), is: Annie Rialland (project leader), Cédric Patin (Maître de Conférences, STL, Université Lille 3), Jean-Marc Beltzung (post-doc), Martial Embanga Aborobongui (doctoral student). The Lyon team, at the Dynamique du Langage (UMR 5596) is: Gérard Philippson (project leader) and Sophie Manus (Maître de Conférences, Université Lyon 2). These three research teams bring together the range of theoretical expertise necessary to investigate the phonology-syntax interface: intonation (Patin, Rialland), tonal phonology (Aborobongui, Downing, Manus, Patin, Philippson, Rialland), phonology-syntax interface (Downing, Patin) and formal syntax (Riedel). They also bring together a range of Bantu language expertise: Western Bantu (Aboronbongui, Rialland), * We would like to thank Jean-Marc Beltzung and Sophie Manus for help reviewing papers for the volume. We are grateful to Jean-Marc Beltzung and Olena Gainulina for indispensable formatting assistance.

Relative clause formation in the Bantu languages of South Africa

Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language …, 2004

This article discusses (verbal) relative clauses in the Bantu languages spoken in South Africa. The first part of the article offers a comparison of the relative clause formation strategies in Sotho, Tsonga, Nguni and Venda. An interesting difference between these language groups concerns the syntactic position and the agreement properties of the relative marker. Whereas the relative markers in Sotho, Tsonga and Venda are clause-initial elements, which express agreement with the head noun, the relative markers in the Nguni languages are relative concords, which are prefixed to the verb and agree with the subject of the relative clause. The second part of the article addresses this difference and shows that there is a historical relation between these two types of relative constructions. It is argued that earlier forms of Nguni employed relative markers similar to those used in present-day Sotho and Tsonga. In Nguni, these relative markers underwent a grammaticalisation process which turned them into relative concords. A detailed analysis of the syntactic conditions for, and the properties of, this grammaticalisation process leads to a hypothesis about the reasons why relative concords have developed in Nguni, but not (to the same extent) in Tsonga, Sotho and Venda.

The relative verb forms of Cuwabo (Bantu P34) as contextually oriented participles

Linguistics 58(2). 463-491., 2020

Cuwabo (Bantu P34, Mozambique) illustrates a relativization strategy, also attested in some NorthWestern and Central Bantu languages, whose most salient characteristics are that: (a) the initial agreement slot of the verb form does not express agreement with the subject (as in independent clauses), but agreement with the head noun; (b) the initial agreement slot of the verb form does not express agreement in person and number-gender (or class), but only in number-gender; (c) when a noun phrase other than the subject is relativized, the noun phrase encoded as the subject in the corresponding independent clause occurs in post-verbal position and does not control any agreement mechanism. In this article, we show that, in spite of the similarity between the relative verb forms of Cuwabo and the corresponding independent verb forms, and the impossibility of isolating a morphological element analyzable as a participial formative, the relative verb forms of Cuwabo are participles, with the following two particularities: they exhibit full contextual orientation, and they assign a specific grammatical role to the initial subject, whose encoding in relative clauses coincides neither with that of subjects of independent verb forms, nor with that of adnominal possessors.

Relative clauses in Hausa: A grammaticalization perspective

Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, 2011

This paper claims that relative clauses in Hausa originate from adverbial scene setting clauses. The scene setting clauses (SSCs) are causal, reason, or circumstantial clauses that evoke known, presupposed information and serve as background to their main clauses. When positioned after a sentence topic, they can shift formally and functionally from clause level to NP level modification and give rise to relative clauses in appropriate contexts. Taking advantage of Role and Reference Grammar's proposed functional and structural similarities between NP and clause modifiers, this paper also gives a representation for various relative constructions in Hausa. 1. Hausa (Chadic) is spoken mainly in Niger and Nigeria. Primary data in this paper are mostly from the Katsinanci dialect and Standard Hausa. The transcription follows Hausa orthography, with some changes. Long vowels are represented as double letters, low tone as grave accent, and falling tone as circumflex accent. High tone is unmarked. The symbol r represents an alveolar trill distinct from the flap r. Written f is pronounced [h] (or [h w ] before [a]) in Katsinanci and other western dialects. Sometimes, two Hausa words (separated by a simple space) may correspond to one word in the interlinear gloss. The abbreviations used are: 1

Grammatical relations in Ikalanga

Studies in African Linguistics

Although facts about grammatical relations in many Bantu languages have been established since the early 1970s, there are still languages in this family which have not benefited from such studies. One of these is Ikalanga, spoken in Botswana and Zimbabwe. This paper examines the core grammatical relations of Ikalanga, exploring its typological status in terms of double object constructions. In prototypical ditransitive constructions, the Recipient NP has all of the properties of Direct Object, whereas the Theme NP has only some of those features. The conclusion is that Ikalanga is an intermediate language if object symmetricity is scalar. However, it is shown that in marked applicative constructions where the Benefactive is non-human and the Theme is human, there is reason to argue for 'split direct-objecthood', reflecting the impact of animacy in the assignment of direct objecthood.