Human relationship terms, discourse prominence, and asymmetrical animacy in Swahili

Abstract

In Swahili, human relationship terms differ from other nouns denoting humans in that they show a complex pattern of concordial agreement with pronominal possessives: with some human relationship terms the possessive must be marked by the concordial prefixes of noun classes 9–10, otherwise used only for inanimates; with others there is variation between animate and Cl. 9–10 concords. By contrast, the “connective particle” -a ‘of’ is consistently marked by animate concords with all human nouns, including human relationship terms. Furthermore, use of Cl. 9–10 concords is limited to contexts where the pronominal possessive immediately follows the Human Relationship Term. This paper explains these facts in semantic and discourse-pragmatic terms, arguing that concord is sensitive to the human relationship term's noun class membership, competition for discourse salience between the human relationship term and the inherently topical pronominal possessive, semantic properties of human relationship terms and the role of the possessive in their interpretation, and the meanings of the associated grammatical morphemes. Where variation between concords exists, concord choice may express differences in affect. The argument is supported by examples from Swahili texts, questionnaire and quantitative data. The historical development of the attested patterns is discussed; some comparison with other Bantu languages is included.