13 Morphosyntactic Correspondence in Bantu Reduplication

and others, the primary goal in the study of partial reduplication has been to construct a theory that insightfully captures the full range of considerations that speakers may invoke in determining how a reduplicant will relate to its base. Given that both phonology and morphology are potentially involved, this has meant two things. First, there has been an attempt to characterize the reduplicant in pro-sodic terms: the shape of a reduplicant is frequently defined by reference to foot, syllable, and/or moraic structure. Second, the literature has shown an increasing awareness of the role of morphological structure in determining the base-reduplicant relationship. have shown that, in addition to prosodic constraints , the realization of a reduplicant may be influenced by purely morphological conditions. In Bantu verb-stem reduplication, for example, simplex stems may redu-plicate di¤erently from polymorphemic ones, which may show further di¤erentia-tions in turn, depending on whether the a‰xes are derivational versus inflectional in nature. Some of these morphological conditions can be quite subtle, and yet, as we will show, provide crucial evidence for our very conception of how and where (partial) reduplication takes place within a grammar. In short, reduplication provides an ideal testing ground for theories of morphology, phonology, and their interface. In this chapter we provide a detailed description of verb-stem reduplication in Ndebele, a Southern Bantu language of the Nguni group, which also includes Zulu, Xhosa, and Swati. We show that the reduplicant in Ndebele is not only conditioned by phonological and morphological factors, as in other Bantu languages, but that these factors are ''abstract'' in nature: despite surface appearances to the contrary, the reduplicant of an Ndebele verb stem must be analyzed as a verb stem itself (cf. Downing 1997a, etc.). Its surface form is obtained not by surface correspondence to the base output, but rather by direct spell-out of its own (identical) morphosyntactic