Jenneke van der Wal - Böcker

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.This book explores variation in Bantu subject and object marking on the basis of data from 75 Bantu languages. It specifically addresses the question of which features are involved in agreement and nominal licensing, and examines how parametric variation in those features accounts for the settings and patterns that are attested crosslinguistically. Jenneke van der Wal proposes a novel syntactic analysis that takes into account not only phi agreement, but also nominal licensing and information structure. A Person feature, associated with animacy, definiteness, or givenness, is shown to be responsible for differential object agreement, while at the same time accounting for doubling vs. non-doubling object marking - a hybrid solution to a long-standing debate. In addition, low functional heads are assumed to be able to Case-license flexibly downwards or upwards, depending on the relative topicality of the two arguments involved. This accounts for the properties of symmetric object marking in ditransitives and for subject inversion constructions. The correlations between the proposed featural parameters reveal new striking patterns that provide evidence in favour of an emergentist view of features and parameters and against both Strong Uniformity and Strong Modularity.

This edition brings together some lesser known grammaticalization paths travelled by ‘come’ and ‘go’ in familiar and less familiar languages. No single book volume has been dedicated to the topic of grammatical targets different from tense and aspect so far. This study will increase our insight in grammaticalization processes in general as they force us to rethink certain aspects of grammaticalization.

This edition brings together some lesser known grammaticalization paths travelled by `come’ and `go’ in familiar and less familiar languages. No single book volume has been dedicated to the topic of grammatical targets different from tense and aspect so far. This study will increase our insight in grammaticalization processes in general as they force us to rethink certain aspects of grammaticalization.

This volume brings together descriptions and analyses of the conjoint/disjoint alternation, a typologically significant phenomenon found in many Bantu languages. The chapters provide in-depth documentation, comparative studies and theoretical analyses of the alternation from a range of Bantu languages, showing its crosslinguistic variation in constituent structure, morphology, prosody and information structure.