(Dar es Salaam University College of Education, 2018) Ndomba, Rodrick Gregory
Agreement is one of the conspicuous characteristics of structural relations holding among
the categories or elements in syntactic constituents—clauses and phrases—in Bantu
languages. This paper focuses on agreement relations in nominal phrases, specifically
agreement between nouns (nPs) and respective elements, also called modifiers, in Bantu
languages. The paper is premised around the Noam Chomsky’s minimalist approach,
which assumes that items or elements in a phrase or clause standing in an agreement
configuration are arranged via successive Merger binary operations taking place in a
bottom-up fashion. Using evidence from Kiswahili, the paper argues that the agreement
between head nouns and its modifiers of DP in Bantu languages stem from the raising of
the head noun – nP. The approach to deriving agreement in Bantu DPs pursued departs
from head specifier relations via government and the raising of N to class prefix via probe
goal relations. The paper has assumed that proper agreement is a function of syntactic
operations, specifically the raising of XP (nP) to Spec DP.