How to Become a ‘kwa’ Verb

Within the Niger-Congo family, some languages have very complex, agglutinative verb structure whose head-marking supports multiple objects and unmarked adjuncts. Others have very simplex (often monosyllabic) verb structure, little or no morphology, and an analytical syntax whereby objects and adjuncts are marked by adpositions and/or serial verbs. Assuming the former to be original, in this paper I distinguish three separate changes in the latter that seem, roughly, to correlate: (i) Syntactically, there is a gradual change from multiple to single object marking. (ii) Morphologically, there is the gradual loss of verb suffixes which mark argument structure, e.g. causatives, applicatives, passives, reciprocals. (iii) Phonologically, gradual size (and other) prosodic limitations are introduced on the verb. It is this last phenomenon which has received the least amount of attention, but which, I argue, is an important factor in determining the morphological and syntactic developments as well. While I will show that the syntactic changes occurred first, there is an intimate interdependency between the three affected parts of the grammar which has not been sufficiently appreciated.