Object agreement and specificity in early Swahili.

Subject Agreement, Object Agreement and Specificity in Swahili

The Discourse Function of Object Marking in Swahili

1. Introduction The Swahili object marker (OM) is a verbal prefix that agrees with an object of the verb. In Swahili there is no semantic or lexical class of objects for which object marking is obligatory, nor is there any class for which it is impossible. The numerous earlier studies of the object marker have discovered no hard and fast rules for its distribution. Its usage has been found to c...

The Form and Interpretation of Finite and non-Finite Verbs in Swahili

A great deal is known about the distribution of finite and non-finite forms in early language and increasingly, studies are investigating the semantic properties of these different forms. An important question for acquisition theory concerns the relationship between the child's developing morphosyntax and the semantics typically expressed by these structures. In this paper we will explore the f...

Object Agreement and Specificity in Swahili

The acquisition of abstract categories of language (such as tense, aspect and agreement among others) has commanded much of the attention of the field of language acquisition for many decades now. How early do children show knowledge of these abstract properties of language, and how do they acquire them? One such abstract property of language is nominal specificity. In some languages a noun is ...

The Acquisition of Swahili Verbal Morphology

Recently, much attention has focused on the so-called Root Infinitive(RI) phenomenon, where children in languages such as German use infinitival verbs in root context, seemingly optionally. English has been argued to be an RI language (Wexler 1994), though English speaking children use bare stems instead of infinitives. Languages such as Italian, however, have been shown not to exhibit RIs in e...