Ellen Contini-Morava

Human relationship terms, discourse prominence, and asymmetrical animacy in Swahili

Abstract In Swahili, human relationship terms differ from other nouns denoting humans in that they show a complex pattern of concordial agreement with pronominal possessives: with some human relationship terms the possessive must be marked by the concordial prefixes of noun classes 9–10, otherwise used only for inanimates; with others there is variation between animate and Cl. 9–10 concords. By contrast, the “connective particle” -a ‘of’ is consistently marked by animate concords with all human nouns, including human relationship terms. Furthermore, use of Cl. 9–10 concords is limited to contexts where the pronominal possessive immediately follows the Human Relationship Term. This paper explains these facts in semantic and discourse-pragmatic terms, arguing that concord is sensitive to the human relationship terms noun class membership, competition for discourse salience between the human relationship term and the inherently topical pronominal possessive, semantic properties of human relationship terms and the role of the possessive in their interpretation, and the meanings of the associated grammatical morphemes. Where variation between concords exists, concord choice may express differences in affect. The argument is supported by examples from Swahili texts, questionnaire and quantitative data. The historical development of the attested patterns is discussed; some comparison with other Bantu languages is included.

Deictic explicitness and event continuity in Swahili discourse

Abstract This paper addresses the question whether a sequence of two verb forms is to be analyzed as a discontinuous morphological unit (i.e. a compound tense) or a sequence of separate verbs. In the case of Swahili verb sequences consisting of an inflected form of kuwa ‘be’ followed by another inflected verb, syntactic arguments can be advanced for both analyses. Co-occurrence restrictions on permissible tense combinations support a compound tense analysis; the fact that kuwa and V 2 can each be independently negated and can have different subject prefixes supports a two-verb analysis. Discourse data are used to argue in favor of a two-verb analysis. By means of examples from texts and quantitative data it is argued that kuwa supplies deictic orientation for verbs whose orientation is not obvious from context. Such explicit orientation is needed in situations where there is a break in continuity between events, such as introduction of a new subject, that might cause difficulty in integrating a verb into its context. Restrictions on permissible tense combinations in kuwa + V sequences are given a semantic/pragmatic explanation. Implications of the analysis for other languages with relative tense are discussed.