How ‘person’ got into focus: Grammaticalization of clefts in Lingala and Kikongo areas

Jenneke van der Wal; Jacky Maniacky

doi:10.1515/ling-2014-0033

Article

How ‘person’ got into focus: Grammaticalization of clefts in Lingala and Kikongo areas

Jenneke van der Wal and Jacky Maniacky

Published/Copyright: December 24, 2014

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From the journal Linguistics Volume 53 Issue 1

Abstract

In several Bantu languages in the regions where Kikongo and Lingala are spoken, we encounter sentences where the word ‘person’ can appear after the subject of a canonical SVO sentence, resulting in a focused interpretation of the subject. Synchronically, we analyze this as a monoclausal focus construction with moto ‘person’ as a focus marker. Diachronically, we argue, the construction derives from a biclausal cleft, where moto functioned as the head noun of the relative clause. This is a crosslinguistically rare but plausible development. The different languages studied in this paper show variation in the properties indicative of the status of the ‘moto construction’, which reflects the different stages of grammaticalization. Finally, we show how contact-induced grammaticalization is a likely factor in the development of moto as a focus marker.

Keywords: focus; cleft; Lingala; Kikongo; Bantu; grammaticalization

Published Online: 2014-12-24

Published in Print: 2015-1-1

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2014-0033

Keywords for this article

focus; cleft; Lingala; Kikongo; Bantu; grammaticalization