Morphosyntactic variation in Bantu: Focus on East Africa
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Date
2022-06-30
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Claremont Colleges Library
Abstract
Recent studies have developed a systematic approach to morphosyntactic variation among Bantu languages, taking well-known and widely attested construction types as a starting point and sketching their distribution across the family. One such approach, Guérois et al. (2017), utilises 142 morphosyntactic parameters or features, across a sample of some 50 Bantu languages (Marten et al. 2018). The present paper builds on this work and focusses on 10 parameters of variation where there is a significant difference between the values for East African Bantu languages and non-East African Bantu languages of the sample. The parameters relate to areas such as noun class morphology, agreement, and word order and so cover a wide range of morphosyntactic structures. The paper shows that the differences overall can be used for an initial characterisation of East Africa as a morphosyntactic area, with its own specific language change and language contact dynamics.
Description
Keywords
Morphosyntactic variation, word-order, East African Bantu, linguistic areas
Citation
Edelsten, Peter; Gibson, Hannah; Guérois, Rozenn; Mapunda, Gastor; Marten, Lutz; and Taji, Julius (2022) "Morphosyntactic variation in Bantu: Focus on East Africa," Journal of the Language Association of Eastern Africa: Vol. 1: No. 1, Article 4.