How common are languages with different word orders in matrix. Introduction 3 eastern bantu languages based on sound morphosyntactic principles cf. The first of the overt coding properties is word order. Nkadzi wa lob a nlume woman i smipasthit fv manl the woman hit the man. The bantoid languages are a body of some 150 to 200 languages positioned geographically between nigeria and cameroun. To illustrate this, look at the table below which shows translations of the word person and people into some zambian bantu languages. The canonical word order in bantu is svo, and the subjects in the a. A brief summary of the bantu acquisition literature by language is provided below. 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. In some of these languages, however, both object agreement.
East bantu, southeast it is particularly controversial whether bantu language history was treelike. Despite significant typological similarities, eastern bantu languages differ in how informa tion structure is. While the verbs in 2a and 3a show noun class agreement with. Introduction the aim of this article is to draw a comparison of approaches towards word class tagging in two orthographically distinct bantu languages. Bantu languages show svo word order, agglutinative verb structure, and nearly all are tone languages with swahili being an exception.
Greater flexibility in word order in the african languages as compared to english is made possible through 1. 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. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of two types of word level asymmetries and their interaction. However, his works concentrated on the nguni languages, while concerning the. While the first asymmetry will be examined via examples from different languages, the bantu family of ca. 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 climate in their cradle land had become unreliableunpredictable. 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. The structure of the bantu noun phrase researchgate. Although in other germanic languages, the embedded clause word order is svo. What the bantu languages can tell us about word order and movement leston c.
Most bantu languages have tones which serve to make lexical andor grammatical distinctions. The shona bantu word simba, can be used as a verb or noun simba means, be strong, healthy, powerful. Unmarked word order in bantu languages is svo with the subject triggering obligatory agreement on the verb. Bantu languages lack the operation of regular sound shifts. Word order and information structure in makhuwaenahara lot. In other words, in s1 relatives, a heads finp while in s2 relatives it heads forcep. Austin and others published word order in a free word order language. However, not in all languages are verb agreement, word order, or case determined by semantic or grammatical roles as we know them. First, featurevaluation under closest ccommand permits a unified treatment of bantu operator agreement and west germanic complementizer agreement with. Bantu definition, a member of any of several peoples forming a linguistically and in some respects culturally interrelated family in central and southern africa. Despite this i argue that a closest ccommand based account chomsky 2000 is superior to a spechead agreement analysis, for two reasons. As in all bantu languages, the np in ikalanga that bears the subject relation normally pre cedes the verb, as shown in l. There is also a morphological slot within the verb template for object marking, though this is optional in most constructions, depending on the language.
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. They do not form a genetic group but all are in some way more closely related than to bantu than other branches of benuecongo. For example, the prefix ba and the suffix ntu was common among the languages they spoke. 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. Semitic, hamitic, sudanic, bantu and bushman newman 1995. If we consider word stems in bantu languages, what. Morphologythe most distinctive morphological feature of bantu languages is the grouping of nouns in different classes, marked by a prefix. They moved due to the fear of famine, which broke out due to overcrowding and drought. Variation in the expression of information structure in eastern bantu. Third, bantu languages are socalled prodrop languages.
This article on luganda mentions that in passing that several other bantu languages besides luganda invert the subject and verb and use a dedicated attributive verb form indicated with prefixing to form relative clauses. It particularly highlights the importance of information structure for the analysis of morphosyntax in this language family. 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. Specifically interesting in the syntax of bantu languages is the relatively free word order. Linguistic ties between ancient egyptian and bantu x not generally the case in the ancient egyptian language. Disambiguation of morphological analysis in bantu languages. Word order on lower levels tends to be much stricter crosslinguistically, even in socalled discourse configurational languages such as russian. The disjunctive versus conjunctive writing systems in the south african bantu languages have direct implications for word class tagging. The noun class system is part of a much larger inflectional agreement system that permeates most bantu languages. Subject marking is obligatory, and for object marking there is variation in the number of prefixes and their optionality. This word order difference is correlated with a difference in agreement.
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. Additionally, however, polysynthetic languages may have words with multiple stems in a single word which are not compounds. Directional asymmetries in the morphology and phonology of. Many of the african peoples who became participants in the slave trade shared a common cultural bond in their linguistic origins. Schadeberg 143 1 introduction 143 2 proto bantu reconstructions 146. Computational morphological analysers and machinereadable. 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. 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. Twelve bantu languages are spoken by more than five million people, including rundi, rwanda, shona, xhosa, and zulu.
Agreement properties and word order in comparative bantu. They are spoken south of a line from nigeria across the central african republic, the democratic republic of congo, uganda, kenya to southern somalia. Greenbergs first major work was the genetic classification of the languages of africa, published in serialized form in the southwestern journal of anthropologyein 194950. 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. Prominence mismatches and differential object marking in bantu.
In 2b and 3b, however, the subjects follow their verbs. 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. If we consider word stems in bantu languages, what one observes is that each word consists of an. An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination.
The smallest unit that can be utilised by a rule is the word as it is contained in the lexicon. Because of their agglutinative nature, syntax in bantu languages is always on the boundary with. Polysynthetic languages often display a high degree of affixation high number of morphemes per word and fusion of morphemes, like agglutinative and fusional languages. There are no written records of the original language. In the search for a universal theory of syntax, the crosslinguistic comparison of word order variation is a key area to be investigated. Project description bantu syntax and information structure. Bantu, syntax, bantu languages, morphology, information structure, word order. The acquisition of bantu languages katherine demuth brown. Disambiguation of morphological analysis in bantu languages arvi hurskainen department of asian and african studies box 00014 university of helsinki finland arvi. All members of a given class share the same prefix. What the bantu languages can tell us about word order and movement. The nilosaharan languages are presumed to be descended from a common ancestral language and, therefore, to be genetically related.
The word bantu mainly refers to the linguistic classification of more than 200 different african languages. In favour of the tree model, bantu languages are thought to have spread and diversi. Introduction unmarked word order in bantu languages is svo with the subject triggering obligatory agreement on the verb. 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. 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. Had sir alan gardiner referred to bantu languages he would not have chosen salima. Reasons for the bantu migration the reasons for the migration of the bantu are not known but they most likely included the following. At the time, african languages were classified into five families. This chapter provides an overview of the common syntactic features as well as the syntactic microvariation found in the bantu languages. Kiango university of dar es salaam, tanzania abstract the headword of a dictionary entry serves different functions.
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