This paper derives from work we have been doing on unsupervised learning of the morphology of languages with rich morphologies, that is, with a high average number of morphemes per word. Our focus in this paper is Swahili, a major Bantu language of East Africa, and our goal is the development of a system that can automatically produce a morphological analyzer of a text on the basis of a large c...

Majority of Bantu languages encode subjects by head-marking and objects by positional licensing. This reflects a point in the historical process whereby positional licensing of objects becomes obligatory due to the loss of inflecctional morphology. What we observe in synchronic grammar is considerable variation both across and within languages in the use of head-marking morphology for objects. ...

The Tanzanian Bantu language Rangi uses a combination of simple and complex verb forms to encode a range of tense-aspect distinctions. Whilst simple verb forms comprise of a single inflected verb, complex forms involve an auxiliary and a lexical main verb. This paper presents an account of auxiliary constructions in Rangi from the perspective of Dynamic Syntax. Dynamic Syntax (Kempson, Meyer-Vi...

Natural Language Generation (NLG) can be used to generate personalized health information, which is especially useful when provided in one’s own language. However, the NLG technique widely used in different domains and languages—templates—was shown to be inapplicable to Bantu languages, due to their characteristic agglutinative structure. We present here our use of the grammar engine NLG techni...

Purified tissue ferritins isolated from Bantu subjects with gross haemosiderosis, from a patient with idiopathic haemochromatosis (HC) treated by phlebotomy, and from rats with experimental iron overload were studied in order to determine the significance of the abnormality previously demonstrated in tissue isoferritins in patients with IHC. The isoferrin profile of the tissues from the Bantu s...

The current enormous amount of data on the Semantic Web and its increasing uptake raises the question of how this data can be accessed in several languages. OWL provides limited support for multilingualism through the use of an annotation property. However, it is known that more expressive models are required for linguistically demanding applications. Among the possible solutions, Lexicon Model...

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...