Abstract
A distinctive property of Bantu verbs is the division into two domains: a cluster of inflectional prefixes (infl) and a lexical verb stem. This claim has been supported by a range of multidomain effects which single out infl as an independent constituent. Such effects led to the hypothesis that infl in Bantu is of the same category as auxiliary verbs found in auxiliary–participle constructions. This paper investigates syntactic, morphological and phonological complexity effects in Northern Ndebele verbs and concludes that infl in this language cannot be treated as a type of auxiliary. This conclusion is reached through a detailed comparison of infl and verbal auxiliaries, revealing striking asymmetries, syntactic and phonological, between the two. The autonomy of infl is argued to be a reflex of how verbal morphology is organized into complex heads in Bantu languages.
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Notes
Abbreviations: 1 = class 1 (etc.), 1pron = class 1 pronoun, 1sg = 1st person singular (etc.), appl = applicative, aux = auxiliary verb, comp = complementizer, dpst = distant past, fs = final suffix, fut = future tense, inf = infinitve, neg = negation, om = object marker, pst = past tense, pres = present tense, rem = remote, rel = relative marker, rpst = recent past, & = conjunction.
The type competition between phonological representations employed in Distributed Morphology (Embick and Marantz 2008) is crucially among Vocabulary Items, i.e. between realization rules for single morphemes. This is different from the competition between output candidates in globalist frameworks such as Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993; McCarthy and Prince 1993a), where the competitors are alternative outputs of possibly complex forms, such as entire words.
Various treatments and definitions of the concept of word are more broadly discussed in Julien (2002) and the references cited there.
The Final Suffix is the only inflectional morpheme that appears post-verbally. According to the Inflectional Stem Hypothesis and its later adaptations, it belongs to the Verb Stem and not to the Inflectional Stem. The Final Suffix is typically thought of as an agreement morpheme, co-varying with tense, aspect, mood and polarity, even though it may sometimes be the only overt realization of these inflectional categories.
Primary stress is determined by the End Rule and falls on the head of the second trochee. The head of the first foot (in the Inflectional Stem) ends up bearing secondary stress.
The structures in (36) are somewhat simplified: derivational suffixes (applicative or causative) would correspond to the relevant projections (ApplP, CausP) in the V-Stem. Derivational morphology is not of primary concern here, and I will simply assume that the vP constituent comprises the root and all suffixes.
To be precise, Alboiu and Avery (2009) propose that Aspect0 is a phase in Ndebele. Assuming that Prog0 is a type of aspectual head, their proposal for Asp0 naturally extends to Prog0.
A reviewer points out that v might not be the final landing site for verb movement. This is due to the fact that in-situ subjects follow the verb. Assuming that external arguments are generated as specifiers of vP, V-to-v movement does not derive the VS order. Instead, a common assumption about VS orders in Bantu is that the verb moves a bit further, to some low functional projection outside of vP. Incorporating the word order facts requires a minor change in the present analysis: the phasal head which hosts the final suffix is not v 0, but a higher functional head (e.g. Voice). All other parts of the analysis would remain the same. The proposed V-to-v movement is a simplification made for the purposes of this paper—a simplification without any serious consequences for the analysis and the claims made here.
Note that the auxiliary verb undergoes lowering together with inflectional affixes. In relation to that, a reviewer asks whether other auxiliaries (e.g. adverbial auxiliaries) are subject to lowering, as well. I do not claim that lowering applies across the board, i.e. to all heads within every phase. Whether or not a head undergoes lowering must be encoded as a property of a particular head. Phase-boundedness is an additional restriction on lowering in general. My analysis requires making the stipulation that the default auxiliary be in Ndebele is subject to lowering, but determining whether other auxiliaries or light verbs behave the same way requires further investigation of syntactic and morphophonological properties of constructions involving such verbs. I must leave this interesting question for future research.
3rd person is exemplified with class 1 (singular) and class 2 (plural). Other noun classes do not show this allomorphy.
A similar analysis of negation marking was proposed by Haddican (2004) for Basque. As Haddican argues, the initial position of negation in Basque is the result of phrasal movement of the negation marker from Spec,NegP to Spec,PolP.
The analysis of the final suffix is simplified here. The final suffix co-varies not only with polarity but also with tense (and possibly other inflectional features). It is beyond the scope of this paper to determine whether this formal variation stems from contextual allomorphy, from syntactic agreement, or a combination of the two. This choice is largely orthogonal in the present discussion. For simplicity, I treat the final-suffix variability as allomorphy.
A reviewer points out a challenge for the allomorphy analysis of negation concerning a typological observation. In particular, if low and high negation markers are allomorphs, we would expect to find Bantu languages in which low and high negation markers are identical. In appears, however, that Bantu languages systematically utilize different negation morphology in these two positions. In terms of the analysis proposed here, this means that Bantu languages systematically exhibit positional allomorphy in negation. While this aspect of the analysis seems somewhat unsatisfying, it does not invalidate the movement analysis of negation, and therefore I leave this question for future research. It is worth noting that the common alternative view—that NegP can be projected in different positions (depending on clause type etc.)—offers no better answer to this puzzle. The different negation markers are, under this view, essentially positional allomorphs. The variable-base-generation view faces additional challenges, which the movement analysis I propose avoids. Most importantly, it cannot predict which type of negation will surface in a given structure. The movement analysis derives the distribution of high and low negation from independently motivated properties of Ndebele clausal syntax.
A reviewer notes that this lowering looks different that the type of lowering found, for instance, in English VP coordination in, where T undergoes ATB lowering to both conjuncts. Indeed, I propose that postsyntactic lowering in Ndebele is not sensitive to the Coordinate Structure Constraint. Given that the CSC is a syntactic constraint, it is unclear whether postsyntactic displacement is expected to obey the CSC. While ATB lowering is attested (e.g. in English), CSC-insensitive lowering has also been shown to exist (Adger 1997; Wojdak 2007; Robinson 2008). Interestingly, Ndebele has no clear instances of ATB-lowering, but we do find CSC-insensitive lowering outside of compound tenses.
A different view can be found in Sibanda (2004), where the participial high tone is analyzed as originating with the participial subject prefix. In this view, the 2sg prefix u- is underlyingly low when it occurs in finite forms, and underlyingly high when it occurs in a participle. Thus, the low–high variation of subject prefixes is viewed as contextual allomorphy: a toneless prefix has a high-toned allomorph in participles. This tonal alternation is, however, not an idiosyncratic property of a particular prefix, e.g. the 2sg u- in (65). Rather, it is a systematic alternation between finite forms and progressive participles. This generalization is not captured but the allomorphy analysis, where the low–high alternation must be stated for every toneless agreement prefix separately.
In Ndebele we do not observe leftward-directed tone association phenomena. All tone displacement rules shift or spread a tone to the right (Sibanda 2004).
The penultimate syllable may also be metrically strong and targeted by metrical tone spread, instead of the antepenult. The determination of which syllable in metrically strong depends on the so-called conjoint/disjoint alternation, and it is immaterial to the present discussion. In disjoint forms, such as (68a), metrical spread always targets the antepenult.
To be precise, the high tone is a property of the initial vowel of the class prefix, known as the pre-prefix or the augment. The high tone spreads from the augment to the second syllable of the class marker.
The facts in Swahili are more complicated if we consider different simple tenses. For instance, present tense verbs or verbs in the subjunctive mood do not show infl-split effects in stress assignment. It is beyond the scope of this paper to account for this variation in Swahili. The crucial fact is, however, that Swahili does show multidomain effects in some simple tenses, and it is those facts that require attention in the present discussion.
According to Harford (2008), v-to-T movement occurs when tense is marked by a suffix (-ile in Ndebele and Zulu), rather than a prefix. This view assumes that the suffix is, in those cases, an exponent of T. In my view, the final suffix is always the same lower head (v 0, in this analysis), which covaries with tense. As we saw in table (37), this is the case in Ndebele Recent Past: the final suffix is -ile in Recent Past, while T has a null exponent.
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Acknowledgements
For valuable comments and discussion I would like to thank Karlos Arregi, Laura Downing, John Goldsmith, Brent Henderson, Deo Ngonyani, Galen Sibanda, Alan Yu and two anonymous NLLT reviewers. I am especially grateful to my Ndebele consultants: Lily Dubé, Galen Sibanda and Nkululeko Sibanda, and the University of Chicago Rella Cohn Fund donors for supporting this research.
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Pietraszko, A. Auxiliary vs INFL in Bantu. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 36, 265–308 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-017-9373-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-017-9373-0