SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This paper investigates the typological correlation between negation marking and focus marking based on the ‘Bantu Morphosyntactic Variation Database’ (Marten et al. 2018) compiling linguistic data obtained through 142 parameters to capture morphosyntactic microvariation in Bantu languages. Based on the inter-parametric analysis on the correlation between four parameters related to main clause negation marking and one parameter related to morphological focus marking, two typologically significant correlation are established: 1) languages with a postverbal strategy for main clause negation highly tend to have a morphological focus marker, and 2) languages lacking a morphological means of focus marking tend to adopt the preinitial strategy for main clause negation. These two tendencies can be explained from three perspectives, namely, 1) focus as inherent nature of (pragmatic) negation and the incompatibility of preinitial negation with an additional morphological focus marker, 2) the grammaticalisation path from a locative as a focus marking element to postverbal negation particle, and 3) ‘focus contrast’ as a structural requirement in the postverbal negative particle constructions.