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 East Africa, 1 (1). pp. 1-24.
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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.
| Item Type: | Journal Article |
|---|---|
| SOAS Departments & Centres: | Departments and Subunits > School of Languages, Cultures & Linguistics > Department of Linguistics |
| DOI (Digital Object Identifier): | https://doi.org/10.5642/jlaea.OMUG7174 |
| Date Deposited: | 13 Feb 2023 12:37 |
| URI: | https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/38833 |
| Funders: | Leverhulme Trust |
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