Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies ISSN: 1607-3614 (Print) 1727-9461 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rall20 Preface Lutz Marten , Kristina Riedel , Silvester Ron Simango & Jochen Zeller To cite this article: Lutz Marten , Kristina Riedel , Silvester Ron Simango & Jochen Zeller (2012) Preface, Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 30:2, iii-vii, DOI: 10.2989/16073614.2012.737608 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.2989/16073614.2012.737608 Published online: 27 Nov 2012. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 296 View related articles Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rall20 PREFACE The present special issue developed from a panel entitled ‘Bantu subject and object marking’ at the ‘Interactions and Interfaces’ conference held at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, in June 2011. It includes papers presented at the panel, as well as papers submitted in response to an open call for papers. The issues addressed by the contributors include the differences between subject and object marking, the status of subject/object marking as agreement or incorporation of pronouns, different types of subject and object marking patterns, agreement paradigms in specific languages and special cases of subject/object marking in the Bantu languages. The papers in the special issue primarily deal with Eastern and Southern Bantu languages, including Maragoli (J41), Manyika (S13), Mbuun (B87), ciNsenga (N41), Sesotho (S33), Kiswahili (G42), Setswana (S31) and isiZulu (S42), while the comparative papers include data from a wider range of languages. Subject and object marking patterns in Bantu have attracted considerable attention in the linguistics literature, particularly in the last two decades (cf. amongst others Bresnan & Mchombo, 1987; Woolford, 1999; Morimoto, 2002; Beaudoin-Lietz et al., 2004; Carstens, 2005; Creissels, 2005; Deen, 2006; Marten et al., 2007; Baker, 2008; Zeller, 2008a, 2008b; Riedel, 2009; Diercks, 2011). Questions addressed in this body of literature include the distinction between pronominal incorporation and agreement, co-occurrence restrictions between subject and object NPs and subject and object markers, animacy effects, and the behaviour of subject and object markers in specific syntactic environments such as questions, relative clauses, and inversion constructions. Following the publication of works such as Morolong and Hyman (1977) and Duranti (1979) in the late 1970s and the seminal paper by Bresnan and Mchombo (1987), empirical evidence from Bantu languages has contributed to the development of different theoretical analyses of the functional, morphosyntactic and thematic relations between verbs and their arguments, within a wide range of theoretical frameworks (e.g. in Lexical Functional Grammar, Optimality Theory, Government-Binding Theory, the Minimalist Program and Dynamic Syntax). However, although subject and object marking in Bantu has generated growing interest again in recent years, there are still only a few detailed crosslinguistic comparisons, and comprehensive descriptions of this phenomenon are lacking even for otherwise well-described languages, such as Kiswahili and the languages of the Nguni group. The papers in this volume aim to address this gap. The general consensus among Bantu linguists is that with respect to its fundamental properties, subject marking is rather unvaried across the family. Subject marking on the verb is obligatory regardless of the presence or absence of an overt subject NP,1 and subject marking morphology is generally retained by all the languages in the Narrow Bantu group. Syntactic variation in subject marking primarily appears in contexts such as extraction, in focus environments, in inversion constructions and with agreement resolution patterns under coordination. However, there is an on-going debate about the status of subject marking, the nature of the subject position(s) in Bantu, and the syntactic and semantic properties of subjects in particular positions (cf. e.g. Baker 2003, 2008; Carstens 2005; Henderson 2006; Zeller 2008a, 2008b; Marten 2011). Much of the literature on verbal argument morphology in Bantu has focused on object marking. This might be due to the fact that, across the Bantu language family, object marking patterns are much more diverse than subject marking patterns. First, some Bantu languages have not retained object marking (for example Lingala and a number of the languages spoken in the north-west of the Bantu speaking parts of Africa; Beaudoin-Lietz et al., 2004), and some have reduced paradigms, for example Makhuwa, where object markers only exist for Noun Classes 1 and 2 (Kisseberth, 2003; Van der Wal, 2009). Second, a number of Bantu languages allow multiple object markers to appear on a verb, while the majority of Bantu languages allow only one. Third, the properties of object marking differ across the family in a number of respects. For example, some Bantu languages are symmetrical, while others are asymmetrical with respect to the behaviour of the two objects in iii Marten, Riedel, Simango and Zeller ditransitive constructions (cf. Bresnan & Moshi, 1993). In some Bantu languages, object marking is obligatory for certain semantic or grammatical categories of nouns when an overt lexical object NP is present (Marten et al., 2007; Riedel, 2009), whereas in most Bantu languages, object marking is never obligatory, unless the object is dropped or dislocated. Moreover, in some Bantu languages, object marking is sensitive to semantic properties such as animacy or definiteness (Duranti, 1979; Woolford, 1999; Riedel, 2009). Lastly, some Bantu languages show evidence for the dislocation of object-marked objects, while others do not (Van der Spuy, 1993; Henderson, 2006; Buell, 2008; Riedel, 2009).This is often related to the interaction of object marking with the conjoint/disjoint system, a distinction only found in some Bantu languages. Beyond those differences, recent studies show that object marking – like subject marking – is sensitive to its syntactic environment, including extraction, focus, and WH-contexts. The present collection of papers contributes to research on Bantu subject and object marking by providing new, detailed case studies of individual languages, proposing new theoretical analyses and presenting results of comparative studies. The special issue is divided into three sections: subject marking, descriptive and theoretical approaches to object marking and comparative approaches to object marking. The papers on subject marking all deal with subject marking in particular environments, namely focus and coordination. Bostoen and Mundeke’s paper presents novel data from Mbuun, a Bantu language spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and explores the intricate relation between information structure, word-order alternation and alternations in subject marking in the language. In Mbuun, focused objects are moved to pre-verbal position, resulting in SOV order, rather than to the well-described post-verbal or immediate-after-verb focus position. Focus of other constituents also involves movement of the object, but to clause-initial position. For example, for subject focus, the word order is OSV. Subject marking interacts with focus through an alternation of the Class 1 subject marker between á- and ká-, which also depends on tense/aspect. In non-past tenses, for example, ká- is found only with object focus. After a detailed description of the relevant data, the authors develop a historical-comparative analysis of the subject marking alternation. They show the areal distribution of the alternation, and discuss the possible historical relation to a pre-initial verbal marker ka- and an identificational copula ka, found in several Bantu languages. The paper presents data from the northwest of the Bantu speaking area, which is not covered in other papers in the special issue, and adopts a comprehensive historical approach to explaining the facts reported, thus also contributing to the theoretical breadth of the issue. De Vos and Mitchley’s paper presents the only analysis in the collection of papers in this issue which adopts an Optimality Theory approach to Bantu. The authors address agreement with conjoined (subject) NPs in Sesotho. Based on novel empirical data, the authors show that conjoined subjects typically show agreement with the appropriate plural class if two plural nouns of the same class are coordinated, and default agreement Class 2 (for animates) or Class 8/10 (for inanimates) in other cases. The analysis developed employs the four ranked constraints Resolve Number, Max Noun Class, Dep Animacy, and Max Animacy, and shows how the observed patterns result from this ranking. Further support for the analysis comes from the fact that cases which, given the analysis, do not lead to a clear winning candidate, are exactly those cases where speakers do not assign any clear judgements. An interesting additional aspect of the analysis is that it employs not only a [+animacy] feature for Class 2 agreement, but also a corresponding [-animacy] feature for Class 8/10. Simango also examines subject agreement and gender resolution with conjoined NPs, presenting and discussing new data from ciNsenga. He shows that ciNsenga behaves like many other Bantu languages in that it employs the Class 8 subject marker as the default agreement morpheme with iv subjects consisting of two conjoined NPs from different noun classes, and the Class 2 subject marker when both nouns are human. The Class 8 default agreement marker is also used when the conjoined NPs are from the same noun class and singular, but when two plural NPs from the same noun class are coordinated, the corresponding subject agreement marker must also be from this same noun class. Furthermore, Simango shows that gender resolution with complex subjects is affected by word order in ciNsenga. When the subject is extraposed and follows the verb, the Class 8 default marker cannot be used, which implies that conjoint subjects that require this marker cannot be extraposed in ciNsenga. The papers in the second section take descriptive and theoretical approaches to object marking. Each paper deals with the object marking patterns in one Bantu language in detail. The articles by Bax and Diercks and by Zeller discuss the status and properties of object marking in two languages which allow only a single object marker, while Pretorius et al. examine a language which allows for multiple object marking. Bax and Diercks discuss object marking in Manyika from a Minimalist Syntax perspective. They argue that Manyika object markers are clitics rather than agreement markers and propose a number of tests for this distinction. They relate their findings to discussions of Indo-European clitics and other Bantu languages, and propose that Manyika object marking allows local doubling. They attempt to account for the fact that Manyika does not allow object marking in WH-questions, clefts or relative clauses by proposing that these contexts are all focus-related and that the Manyika object marker is an object clitic that triggers a non-focus interpretation. Pretorius, Berg and Pretorius address multiple object marking in the Southern Bantu language Setswana from a corpus linguistics-perspective. The authors present numerous examples of simple and derived ditransitive constructions in Setswana in which both objects are realised as object markers. They show how the phenomenon of multiple object markers can be computationally modelled with the help of specific corpus technology tools (a tokeniser and a morphological analyser). Finally, the authors illustrate the application of these computational tools in corpusbased investigations by means of a proof-of-concept experiment in which a test suite of Setswana sentences with multiple object markers is analysed. Zeller provides a detailed discussion of object marking in isiZulu. Based on several previous descriptive and comparative studies of this phenomenon in Bantu, he investigates the properties of the isiZulu object marker in specific syntactic environments, such as, for example, relative clauses, negated sentences, inversion constructions, or sentences with two dislocated objects, and shows that the morphosyntax of object marking is subject to a range of sometimes very subtle restrictions and constraints. Zeller also addresses the question of whether isiZulu object markers are agreement markers or pronouns. He concludes that the evidence is not unequivocal, and proposes to view object marking in Bantu as not falling into one of two possible types, but rather as being in a grammaticalisation process during which pronouns become more agreement-like. Consequently, the synchronic situation in a given language may reflect aspects of both, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on where in the process of diachronic change the object marking system of the language is. The final section includes papers which take a comparative approach to object marking in Bantu. Two of the papers deal with a particular subset of object markers while the third deals with the basic paradigms of object marking in Bantu. Marten and Kula present a comparative study of object marking based on the comparison of 10 Bantu languages with respect to six parameters: the co-occurrence of object markers and lexical objects, the obligatoriness of object markers with specific classes of objects, the presence of locative object markers, multiple object markers, object marking in double object constructions, v Marten, Riedel, Simango and Zeller and object marking in relative clauses. The study demonstrates the scope of micro-variation found in Bantu object marking and shows that even when adopting very fine-grained parameters, further differences between different languages need to be accounted for. The approach taken in the paper provides a framework for charting this variation and a basis for further empirical and comparative studies. Murrell’s paper presents a descriptive account of the applicative construction and object asymmetry in Kiswahili and Maragoli, a language which to this day remains largely understudied. The paper focuses on the syntactic implications and the semantic roles that result from derivational processes with regard to the typological classification of both languages as being symmetrical or asymmetrical. It is argued, on the basis of several syntactic tests, that Maragoli is a symmetrical language whereas Kiswahili is asymmetrical. Importantly, the paper shows that languages that are classified as ‘asymmetrical’ show divergent object behaviour which is determined by a feature the author describes as ‘an optional alternating object parameter’. Riedel and Marten discuss locative agreement in Bantu and the status of locative phrases as arguments or adjuncts. Discussing data from several north-eastern Bantu languages and several Nguni languages, they show the morphosyntactic and morphological differences between locative agreement and non-locative agreement. They argue that object marking is no evidence for the objecthood of the object-marked NP in Bantu. The paper surveys a number of areas where verbal marking of locatives differs from non-locatives, including contexts where only locative object markers are grammatical, while non-locative object markers are ungrammatical. Notes This is abstracting away from cases which are not relevant for the present discussion, for example when the subject marker is fused with some adjacent morpheme such as tense or negation, or the imperative, where it is generally dropped. 1 References Baker M. 2003. Agreement, dislocation, and partial configurationality. In Carnie A, Harley H & Willie MA (eds) Formal approaches to function in grammar: In honor of Eloise Jelinek. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp 107–132. Baker M. 2008. The syntax of agreement and concord. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Beaudoin-Lietz C, Nurse D & Rose S. 2004. Pronominal object marking in Bantu. In Akinlabi A & Adesola O (eds) Proceedings of the 4th World Congress of African Linguistics. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe, pp 198–197. Bresnan J & Mchombo SA. 1987. Topic, pronoun, and agreement in Chichewa. Language 63(4): 741–782. Bresnan J & Moshi L. 1993. Object asymmetries in comparative Bantu syntax. In Mchombo SA (ed.) Theoretical aspects of Bantu grammar. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, pp 47–91. Buell LC. 2008. VP-internal DPs and right dislocation in Zulu. Linguistics in the Netherlands 2008: 37–49. Carstens VM. 2005. Agree and EPP in Bantu. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 23(2): 219–279. Creissels D. 2005. A typology of subject marker and object marker systems in African languages. In Voeltz F (ed.) Studies in African linguistic typology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp 43–70. Deen KU. 2006. Subject agreement in Nairobi Swahili. In Mugane J (ed.) Selected Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference on African Linguistics. Cascadilla, Somerville, MA, pp 225–233. vi Diercks M. 2011. The morphosyntax of Lubukusu locative inversion and the parameterization of Agree. Lingua 121(5): 702–720. Duranti A. 1979. Object clitic pronouns in Bantu and the Topicality Hierarchy. Studies in African Linguistics 10(1): 31–45. Henderson B. 2006. The syntax and typology of Bantu relative clauses. Doctoral thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Kisseberth C. 2003. Makhuwa (P30). In Nurse D & Philippson G (eds) The Bantu languages. London: Routledge, pp 546–565. Marten L. 2011. Information structure and agreement: Subjects and subject markers in Swahili and Herero. Lingua 121(5): 787–804. Marten L, Kula NC & Thwala N. 2007. Parameters of morphosyntactic variation in Bantu. Transactions of the Philological Society 105: 253–338. Morolong M & Hyman L. 1977. Animacy, objects and clitics in Sesotho. Studies in African Linguistics 8(3): 199–218. Morimoto Y. 2002. Prominence mismatches and differential object marking in Bantu. In Butt M & Holloway King T (eds) Proceedings of the LFG02 Conference. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, pp 296–314. Riedel K. 2009. The syntax of object marking in Sambaa. Doctoral thesis, University of Leiden. Van der Spuy A. 1993. Dislocated noun phrases in Nguni. Lingua 90(4): 335–355. Van der Wal J. 2009. Word order and information structure in Makhuwa-Enahara. Doctoral thesis, University of Leiden. Woolford E. 1999. Animacy hierarchy effects on object agreement. In Kotey P (ed.) New dimensions in African linguistics and languages. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, pp 203–216. Zeller J. 2008a. The subject marker in Bantu as an antifocus marker. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics 38: 221-254. Zeller J. 2008b. On the subject marker in Kinyarwanda. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 26(4): 407–428. Lutz Marten1*, Kristina Riedel2, Silvester Ron Simango3 and Jochen Zeller4 1 Departments of the Languages and Cultures of Africa and Linguistics, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG, UK 2Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 4080 Foreign Language Building, 707 S Mathews Avenue, MC-168, Urbana, IL 61801, USA 3Department of English Language and Linguistics, Rhodes University, PO Box 94, Grahamstown 6140, South Africa 4 Linguistics Programme, School of Arts, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban King George V Avenue, Durban 4041, South Africa *Corresponding author, e-mail: lutzmarten@soas.ac.uk DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2989/16073614.2012.737608 vii