The subject marker in Bantu as an antifocus marker

By Jochen Zeller. 2012

56 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In most Bantu languages, subject-verb agreement is expressed by prefixing a subject marker (SM) to the verb stem; the SM agrees with the noun class features of the preverbal subject. In this paper I suggest that a preverbal subject DP and the corresponding SM start out as one constituent in the derivation. I argue that the class 5 subject noun phrase ikati ("cat") and the class 5 SM li-, which is prefixed to the verb in (1), are initially part of the same phrase.

Subfields: Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6fa40274c572c9569c922703f7d6db5587e642bc