Some Problems of Transitivity in Swahili

Whiteley, W. H.

doi:10.4324/9780203985410

Cited by 6 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…Patient inversion in Swahili, shown in the next two examples, can give rise to ‘counter-expectational’ interpretations. In (12) the climbing of the hill is remarkable: Whiteley & Mganga (1969: 115) provide as a context a situation where walking on the hill was tabooed, but some foreigners, unaware of the taboo, were climbing it. In (13) singing the song constitutes the remarkable event: ‘The whole ceremony is being praised’ (Whiteley & Mganga 1969: 113).…”

Section: Inversion Constructions In Bantu: An Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, we will see below that the cross-linguistic predictions of this proposal are not fully borne out [7] . Furthermore, Whiteley & Mganga (1969), Kimenyi (1980) and Gibson (2008), among others, show that the pragmatic effects of patient inversion in Kinyarwanda and Swahili are context-dependent and more subtle than can be captured by assigning topic and focus features alone.…”

Section: Previous Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(47) Fá-se-tlharé-ng 16-7-tree-LOC 'An aeroplane has landed on the airfield (so the airfield is in use again).' (Whiteley & Mganga 1969, Whiteley 1972, Russell 1985 The examples show the range of pragmatic effects associated with inversion constructions, ranging from exclusive and contrastive focus on the logical subject to presentational and thetic interpretations. In our analysis, all these effects result from the same underlying structural dynamics.…”

Section: Topic Focus and Information Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…7-airfield SM7-PRS-land-FV 9.aeroplane 'An aeroplane has landed on the airfield (so the airfield is in use again).' (Whiteley & Mganga 1969, Whiteley 1972, Russell 1985 Bantu languages, subjects cannot be questioned (or focused) in-situ, and subject questions take either the form of a cleft, or an inversion construction (see e.g. Zerbian 2006).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Structure building and thematic constraints in Bantu inversion constructions

Marten

Gibson

2015

J. Ling.

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Bantu inversion constructions include locative inversion, patient inversion (also called subject–object reversal), semantic locative inversion and instrument inversion. The constructions show a high level of cross-linguistic variation, but also a core of invariant shared morphosyntactic and information structural properties. These include: that the preverbal position is filled by a non-agent NP triggering verbal agreement, that the agent follows the verb obligatorily, that object marking is disallowed, and that the preverbal NP is more topical, and the postverbal NP more focal. While previous analyses have tended to concentrate on one inversion type, the present paper develops a uniform analysis of Bantu inversion constructions. Adopting a Dynamic Syntax perspective, we show how the constructions share basic aspects of structure building and semantic representation. In our analysis, cross-linguistic differences in the distribution of inversion constructions result from unrelated parameters of variation, as well as from thematic constraints related to the thematic hierarchy. With some modification, the analysis can also be extended to passives.

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Section: Inversion Constructions In Bantu: An Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Previous Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Topic Focus and Information Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Structure building and thematic constraints in Bantu inversion constructions

Marten

Gibson

2015

J. Ling.

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“…The British had quickly decided to make use of Tanganyika's existing lingua franca, and had begun a process of standardising Swahili as early as 1925, a process continued by the Inter-Territorial Language Committee, established by the colonial governments of Tanganyika, Kenya, Zanzibar and Uganda in 1930. 19 They too were concerned about Arabic influences, but confined themselves to such tasks as correcting spellings deemed to owe too much to the Arabic root of particular words: thus, for example, Asli became asili, and fikra became fikira. 20 The spelling used in Roehl's translations was that approved by the Inter-Territorial Language Committee, and so the Bible Society which eventually published the complete Bible was able to describe it as 'the first edition of the Bible in a standardized Swahili written in the standardized orthography'.…”

Section: The Roehl Biblementioning

confidence: 99%

Language, Empire and the World: Karl Roehl and the History of the Swahili Bible in East Africa

Hunter

2013

The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History

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The verbal extensions in Southern Bantu languages: a descriptive and comparative classification

Westphal¹,

Masiea²,

Tindleni³

et al. 1974

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies

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At the beginning of this year (1973) members of the Department of African Languages at the University of Cape Town met in a daily seminar to discuss post-radical elements in predicatives [P] occurring in sentences [Ss] of the type:Ss → [(S) + P]where the subject [S] precedes a verbal predicate [Pv] … but not a copular predicate [Pc]. The topic of our discussions was in part the subject of Professor Whiteley's work on transitivity in Swahili, though we extended it to consider the relationship between the verbal extensions … which we will consider here … and certain syntactical preferences. In this work we were happily joined by Professor A. N. Tucker and it seemed to us that the subject of our labours was a fitting contribution to the memorial publication planned for Wilfred Whiteley by his colleagues at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London. Even though my colleagues did not have the pleasure of knowing Wilfred Whiteley they wished to be joined in this tribute to a fellow Bantuist.

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Some Problems of Transitivity in Swahili

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Structure building and thematic constraints in Bantu inversion constructions

Structure building and thematic constraints in Bantu inversion constructions

Language, Empire and the World: Karl Roehl and the History of the Swahili Bible in East Africa

The verbal extensions in Southern Bantu languages: a descriptive and comparative classification

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