Morphosyntactic variation in Bantu: Focus on East Africa

Peter Edelsten (1) , Hannah Gibson (2) , Rozenn Guérois (3) , Gastor Mapunda (4) , Lutz Marten (1) , Julius Taji (4)

1 SOAS - School of Oriental and African Studies
2 University of Essex
3 LLACAN - Langage, LAngues et Cultures d'Afrique
4 UDSM - Université de Dar es Salaam

Recent studies have developed a systematic approach to morphosyntactic variation among Bantu languages, taking well-known and widely attested construction types as a starting point and sketching their distribution across the family. One such approach, Guérois et al. (2017), utilises 142 morphosyntactic parameters or features, across a sample of some 50 Bantu languages (Marten et al. 2018). The present paper builds on this work and focusses on 10 parameters of variation where there is a significant difference between the values for East African Bantu languages and non-East African Bantu languages of the sample. The parameters relate to areas such as noun class morphology, agreement, and word order and so cover a wide range of morphosyntactic structures. The paper shows that the differences overall can be used for an initial characterisation of East Africa as a morphosyntactic area, with its own specific language change and language contact dynamics.

Mots clés: Morphosyntactic variation; word-order; East African Bantu; linguistic areas

Domaines: Linguistique

Peter Edelsten, Hannah Gibson, Rozenn Guérois, Gastor Mapunda, Lutz Marten, et al.. Morphosyntactic variation in Bantu: Focus on East Africa. Journal of the Language Association of Eastern Africa , 2022, 1 (1), pp.1-22. ⟨10.5642/jlaea.OMUG7174⟩. ⟨hal-03924991⟩