Bantu Syntax

Wal, Jenneke van der

doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935345.013.50

Cited by 13 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…traditional abstract Case or what we have referred to as Vergnaud licensing) and search for an alternative nominal licensing system in these languages. Since information structure is known to play a pervasive role in the syntax of Bantu languages (Downing & Hyman 2015, Van der Wal 2015c, Güldemann, Zerbian & Zimmermann 2015), the alternative licensing system might be hypothesised to be based upon one or more categories in information structure. For example, argument indexing on the verb and movement to the preverbal position need not be related to subject licensing: The preverbal position in many Bantu languages has been argued to be restricted to topical/non-focal elements (see, among others, Bokamba 1976; Morimoto 2000; Sabel & Zeller 2006; Zerbian 2006, 2007; Van der Wal 2009; Yoneda 2011), and ‘subject’ agreement has been argued to be directly related to topicality (Morimoto 2006 for Kirundi), or indirectly via the requirement to agree with a higher, preverbal element (Baker 2003, 2008; Collins 2004; Carstens 2005; Diercks 2011).…”

Section: Summary Of Results and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nominal licensing in caseless languages

Sheehan

Wal

2018

J. Ling.

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This paper provides evidence for a kind of nominal licensing (Vergnaud licensing) in a number of morphologically caseless languages. Recent work on Bantu languages, has suggested that abstract Case or nominal licensing should be parameterised (Diercks 2012, Van der Wal 2015a). With this is mind, we critically discuss the status of Vergnaud licensing in six languages lacking morphological case and agreement. While Luganda appears to systematically lack a Vergnaud licensing requirement, Makhuwa more consistently displays evidence in favour of it, as do all of the analytic languages that we survey (Mandarin, Yoruba, Jamaican Creole and Thai). We conclude that, while it seems increasingly problematic to characterise nominal licensing in terms of uninterpretable/abstract Case features, we nonetheless need to retain a (possibly universal) notion of nominal licensing, the explanation for which remains opaque.

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Section: Summary Of Results and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nominal licensing in caseless languages

Sheehan

Wal

2018

J. Ling.

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“…Notice, the order √ -Y -X is not predicted to be possible to derive by head movement given the Mirror Principle and the Head Movement Constraint (Travis 1984). That is to say the closer head to √ cannot be separated from it by a head further away.…”

Section: … Y X √mentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Hence, c-command is translated into linear precedence by Merger. Head Movement, which I assume is subject to the Head Movement Constraint (Travis 1984) can bring heads into configurations allowing Merger. Under Kayne's (1994: 15-21) approach, the moved head c-commands the head it adjoins to and thus syntactic head movement always results in left-adjunction.…”

Section: … Y X √mentioning

confidence: 99%

Templatic morphology through syntactic selection: Valency-changing extensions in Kinyarwanda

Banerjee

2019

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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The existence of both morphological templates (Hyman 2003) and Mirror Principle (Baker 1985) compliant behaviour in the same language presents an interesting case of grammatical principles at odds. The two principles sometimes predict opposite orderings for the surface form of valency-changing derivational morphology in Bantu languages. In Kinyarwanda, this tension is unresolved, leading to certain forms being unavailable, rather than favouring one principle over the other. Independently available periphrastic forms are used to convey the problematic meanings. This paper presents an alternative to syntactic movement or Optimality Theoretic analyses for templatic morphology that have been proposed in the literature. It argues that syntactic selection by heads can better derive the facts of Kinyarwanda. Independent syntactic properties of the heads that underlie the derivational morphology suggest a particular set of selectional properties for these heads in Kinyarwanda, independent of the data showing their ordering. An analysis based on syntactic selection is sufficient to account both for the orders of the morphemes and their syntactic properties. This result suggests, in line with recent work, that syntactic selection is an alternative mechanism by which seemingly templatic behaviour in the morphology can be realised (

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“…Verbs in Kinyarwanda are highly inflectional, and are commonly analyzed as consisting of a string of morphemes, the order of which is determined by a template (Banerjee 2019;Creissels 2019;Hyman 2003;Hyman & Inkelas 2017;Wal 2015). In his analysis of Kinyarwanda, Banerjee (2019) follows most literature on Bantu (Hyman 2003;Hyman & Inkelas 2017;Wal 2015) and specifies that this template determines the order of the morphemes as follows: subject -tense -object -verbal radical -extensions -aspect -final vowel. Extension is a collective term for a number of valency changing morphemes (Banerjee 2019), and the final vowel is sometimes analyzed as a mood marker (Goldsmith & Mpiranya 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In Proto-Bantu the noun class system was semantically productive, but synchronically it no longer is. For each noun there is a class for the singular and a different one for the plural (Demuth 2000;Nurse & Philippson 2006;Wal 2015). For example the Kinyarwanda noun umupfayongo "absent minded person" is of class one and can be represented as follows: the lexeme pfayongo and its morpholosyntactic property set {class one}: <pfayongo, {class one}>.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs in the Discriminative Lexicon

Vijver¹,

Uwambayinema²,

Chuang³

2021

Preprint

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How do speakers comprehend and produce complex words? In the theory ofthe Discriminative Lexicon this is hypothesized to be the results of mapping the phonology of whole word forms onto their semantics and vice versa, without recourse to morphemes. This raises the question whether this hypothesis also holds true in highly agglutinative languages, which are oǒten seen to exemplify the compositional nature of morphology. On the one hand, one could expect that the hypothesis for agglutinative languages is correct, since it remains unclear whether speakers are able to isolate the morphemes they need to achieve this. On the other hand, agglutinative languages have so many different words that it is not obvious how speakers can use their knowledge of words to comprehend and produce them.In this paper, we investigate comprehension and production of verbs in Kinyarwanda,an agglutinative Bantu language, by means of computational modeling within the theDiscriminative Lexicon, a theory of the mental lexicon, which is grounded in word andparadigm morphology, distributional semantics, error-driven learning, and uses insightsof psycholinguistic theories, and is implemented mathematically and computationallyas a shallow, two-layered network.In order to do this, we compiled a data set of 11528 verb forms and annotated for eachverb form its meaning and grammatical functions, and, additionally, we used our dataset to extract 573 verbs that are present in our full data set and for which meanings ofverbs are based on word embeddings. In order to assess comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs, we fed both data sets into the Linear Discriminative Learningalgorithm, a two-layered, fully connected network. One layer represent the phonological form and the layer represents meaning. Comprehension is modeled as a mapping from phonology to meaning and production is modeled as a mapping from meaning to phonology. Both comprehension and production is learned with high accuracy in all data and in held-out data, both for the full data set, with manually annotated semantic features, and for the data set with meanings derived from word embeddings.Our findings provide support for the various hypotheses of the Discriminative Lexicon:Words are stored as wholes, meanings are a result of the distribution of words in utterances, comprehension and production can be successfully modeled from mappings from form to meaning and vice versa, which can be modeled in a shallow two-layered network, and these mappings are learned in by minimizing errors.

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Bantu Syntax

Cited by 13 publications

References 20 publications

Nominal licensing in caseless languages

Nominal licensing in caseless languages

Templatic morphology through syntactic selection: Valency-changing extensions in Kinyarwanda

Comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs in the Discriminative Lexicon

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