Speaker: Christopher Legerme (MIT)
Title: Some Aspects of Bantu Morphology, featuring Leland Paul Kusmer (2019)
Time: Thursday, September 10th, 5pm – 6pm
Location: 32-D769
Abstract: Discussion on verbal morphology in Bantu, focusing on the conjoint/disjoint alternation, where a verb’s surface realization depends on its syntactic, information-structural, or prosodic relation to what follows it. Ill walk through some of the core Bantu facts and compare them with similar patterns in the French Creole languages I work on. Ill then present Kusmers (2019) analysis of the conjoint/disjoint alternation in Tshiven?a. Unlike more familiar Bantu systems, the two morphological variants of a verb are not straightforwardly in complementary distribution in this language: some linguistic environments permit either form. The paper reports results from an experiment testing speakers choices across different syntactic contexts. Kusmer suggests that the variation in Tshiven?a may track prosodic phrasing. Ill use these results as a starting point for further discussion of how we should understand the relationship between prosody and morphological exponence.