What’s in a Bantu verb? Actionality in Bantu languages

Disambiguation of morphological analysis in Bantu languages

The paper describes problems in disambiguating the morphological analysis of Bantu languages by using Swahili as a test language. The main factors of ambiguity in this language group can be traced to the noun class structure on one hand and to the bi-directional word-formation on the other. In analyzing word-forms, the system applied utilizes SWATWOL, a morphological parsing program based on tw...

The Consequences of the Contacts between Bantu and Non-Bantu Languages around Lake Eyasi in Northern Tanzania

In rural Tanzania, recent major influences happen between Kiswahili and English to ethnic languages rather than ethnic languages, which had been in contact for so long, influencing each other. In this work, I report the results of investigation of lexical changes in indigenous languages that aimed at examining how ethnic communities and their languages, namely Cushitic Iraqw, Nilotic Datooga, N...

Finite State Methods for Bantu Verb Morphology

The natural history of verb-stem reduplication in Bantu

In this study I present a comparative and historical analysis of ‘‘frequentative’’ Bantu verb-stem reduplication, many of whose variants have been described for a number of Eastern and Southern Bantu languages. While some languages have full-stem compounding, where the stem consists of the verb root plus any and all suffixes, others restrict the reduplicant to two syllables. Two questions are a...

Privative Tone in Bantu

The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of “zeroing out” a tone in the above sense: When is an opposition properly analyzed as the presence vs. absence of a tone, rather than two different indications of tone, e.g. a + vs. of a tone feature?1 Although phonetic pitch (Fo) is scalar in nature, phonological (categorical) tone frequently has a privative character. The most frequent situat...