Locative trigrams in Northern Sotho, preceded by analyses of formative bigrams

In Northern Sotho one of the strategies to express locality makes use of locative particle groups, being complements preceded by any of the so-called locative particles ka, kua, mo, ga, or go. Current linguistic descriptions shy away from those cases where sequences of such particles are employed. In this article these sequences are termed ‘‘locative n-grams’’ and are studied for the first time. It will be shown that, synchronically, just a handful of locative trigrams and bigrams do actually occur in a relatively large corpus. An in-depth study of the examples allows taking stock of the existing structures, provides data regarding the distribution of all the n-grams, and hints at the semantic content as well as the restrictions posed on the nature of the complements. In order to get clarity on the latter two aspects, a diachronic approach is often pursued. As a by-product, the study of the higher-order n-grams also brings hitherto overlooked features of the unigrams to light. The main research question that drove this investigation was thus to find out whether or not higher-order locative n-grams exist in Northern Sotho. As the answer was found to be positive, the major objective became to describe the found structures minutely by drawing on corpus data.