Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Syntax and Semantics of Applicative Morphology in Bantu

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

Language serves not just as a means of communication but also a window into how humans perceive and categorize the world. Words define basic categories of objects or situations, and contrasts between words with similar but subtly distinct meanings provide clues as to what properties of the world humans find significant. One of the most tantalizing results of the last several decades of linguistic work on word meaning is that a word's meaning also figures into its grammatical properties and can constrain the grammatical contexts in which it occurs, albeit in regular and systematic ways, offering still further clues as to how humans perceive the world. However, the relationship of word meaning to grammar varies among languages. Thus it is important to have a diverse sampling of languages in order to capture the full spectrum of how languages describe the world. This dissertation investigates the grammatical and semantic relationships between word meaning and grammar in the Bantu languages of Sub-Saharan Africa. More broadly, this study incorporates a new set of languages into work on the semantic underpinnings of grammar, an area that to date has focused heavily on European languages. It also promotes academic research on the languages and cultures of Africa, which is important for improving international collaboration. There are many misunderstandings about Africa in American society, especially relating to the geographic, cultural, and linguistic diversity of the people who inhabit the African continent. The inclusion of African languages in linguistic research promotes more dialogue between Western and African voices. The specific research question concerns the semantics of Bantu "applicative" morphology, a type of optional suffix on a verb that, when present, typically introduces a new participant into the event described by the verb, expressed as a new direct object. While previous approaches to this phenomenon generally predict that the applicative morphology should behave uniformly across all verbs, this study demonstrates that there is a significant interaction of verb and applicative meaning in determining what the semantic function of the applicatives is and the grammatical effects it has.This in turn gives us new insights into how verb meaning constrains the overall grammatical structure and interpretation of the sentence and thus ultimately to how languages construe situations in the world. This dissertation investigates applicative morphology in three Bantu of Eastern Africa: Kinyarwanda (Rwanda), Chichewa (Malawi), and Lubukusu (Kenya). It uses standard elicitation techniques to collect data from native speakers from these different linguistic groups, creating a rich new database of original data, to be analyzed using state-of-the art techniques for analyzing syntax and semantics and the relationship of the two. The outputs are thus a rich new dataset for further research, and also new insights into the universality of human languages and human cognition regarding how speakers construe events in the world.