Object marking and morphosyntactic variation in Bantu

Abstract

The paper presents a detailed discussion of morphosyntactic variation in object marking in Bantu. Building on previous work (Marten et al., 2007), the paper investigates variation in object marking in 16 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, and object marking in relative clauses. The study shows that even within these fine-grained parameters, variation between different languages can be further distinguished. The paper provides a systematic overview of the kind of morphosyntactic variation found in Bantu, and provides an empirical framework for further descriptive and comparative studies.

Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 2012, 30(2): 237–253