Abstract
This article presents the Bantu relative agreement (BRA) cycle, a scenario of recurrent morphosyntactic change that involves the emergence of relativizers, which are subsequently integrated into the relative verb form, where they can ultimately replace the original subject agreement prefix. All logical outcomes at every stage of the cycle are amply attested in the languages of the Bantu family. The BRA cycle makes sense of many of the puzzling characteristics of relative clause constructions in the Bantu languages, especially in the domain of agreement.
Funding source: French National Research Agency (ANR)
Award Identifier / Grant number: ANR-10-LABX-0083
Acknowledgments
This work is partially supported by a public grant overseen by the French National Research Agency (ANR) as part of the program “Investissements d’Avenir” (reference: ANR-10-LABX-0083). It contributes to the IdEx Université de Paris – ANR-18-IDEX-0001. I wish to thank Denis Creissels, Larry Hyman, and Dmitry Idiatov, as well as the audiences at CALL in Leiden (2017) and Reconstructing Proto-Bantu Grammar in Ghent (2018) for their comments.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- What participles are a mixture of
- Typology of partitives
- Rapid radiation of the inner Indo-European languages: an advanced approach to Indo-European lexicostatistics
- The Bantu relative agreement cycle
- On the role of creativity in the formation of new complex words
- Temporal relations of free indirect discourse events
- Suǒyǐ ‘so’, they are different: an integrated subjectivity account of Mandarin RESULT connectives in conversation, microblog and newspaper discourse
- The sound of gender – correlations of name phonology and gender across languages
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- What participles are a mixture of
- Typology of partitives
- Rapid radiation of the inner Indo-European languages: an advanced approach to Indo-European lexicostatistics
- The Bantu relative agreement cycle
- On the role of creativity in the formation of new complex words
- Temporal relations of free indirect discourse events
- Suǒyǐ ‘so’, they are different: an integrated subjectivity account of Mandarin RESULT connectives in conversation, microblog and newspaper discourse
- The sound of gender – correlations of name phonology and gender across languages