When two nominal constituents are in a relation of dependency in the Bantu languages, the syntactically dependent constituent is usually introduced by a relator. In Bantu studies this relator is called connective (also associative, genitive or connexive) element (or pronoun, clitic, prefix, marker or particle). The order is HEAD (R1) RELATOR (REL) DEPENDENT (R2). R1 and R2 are short for first a...

Several languages, including Amharic (Semitic; Leslau 1995), Engenni (Kwa; Thomas 1978) and possibly Aghem (Bantu; Hyman 1979) display a curious pattern in which an indexical pronoun such as ‘I’ or ‘you’ can refer to the speaker or hearer of a reported speech act rather than of the actual discourse (see also Hale & Platero 1996 and Speas 1999 for related facts in Navajo). The following is an ex...

The study of intonation in a (fully) tone language presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to see how a language which exploits F0 mainly for the purpose of lexical and grammatical contrasts succeeds in encoding the functions often expressed by means of intonation in non-tonal languages. As is well-known, word-level distinctions can be quite rich in tone systems, which co...

This article reports on a study that involves improving a tone label prediction algorithm. Tone is an important prosodic feature for Bantu languages since these languages use it to distinguish meaning. Studies have shown that text-to-speech systems need detailed prosodic models of a language in order to sound natural to native speakers of the language. Thus, textto-speech systems developed for ...

Northern Sotho and Zulu are two South African Bantu languages that make use of different writing systems, viz. a disjunctive and a conjunctive writing system respectively. In this article it is argued that the different orthographic systems obscure the morphological similarities and that these systems impact directly on word class tagging for the two languages. It is illustrated that not only d...

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...

1. INTRODUCTION. Most Bantu languages have a set of highly productive verbal deriva-tional suffixes which alter the argument structure and semantics of basic verb roots. 1 One example of such a suffix is the Causative, which gives a verb stem causative semantics and allows it to take an extra causer argument. A prototypical instance of the use of the Causative, drawn from Chichewa (Baker 1988:1...

The terminology used to describe neuropathic pain appears to be conserved across languages, which facilitates the translation of validated neuropathic pain screening tools into other languages. However, this assumption has not been assessed in an African language. Therefore we investigated the terminology used by 54 patients whose native language was isiZulu, a major Bantu language of Africa, w...