SOAS Research Online

Abstract

A distinction is often made between words expressing lexical content and those expressing grammatical functions. As a result, content words such as nouns and verbs are typically distinguished from function words such as auxiliaries and pronouns. The lexical information encoded by content words is often seen as fully determined and largely invariant across contexts, while procedural, functional expressions are considered to lack a fully specified interpretation and be context dependent. This chapter investigates an empirical domain which highlights the interaction between content and function where these relations appear to be reversed. The case under examination is the use of lexical NPs (expressions comprised of content words) in the Bantu languages Makhuwa and Cuwabo where they appear as anaphoric elements (as context dependent expressions) in discourse. We show that this usage is linked to a specific aspect of the morphosyntax of the two languages—their restricted object marking system—and that the relationship between lexical content and discourse function cannot be assumed to be cross-linguistically universal.