A Featural Typology of Bantu Agreement (Rethinking Comparative Syntax)

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This book explores variation in Bantu subject and object marking on the basis of data from 75 Bantu languages. It specifically addresses the question of which features are involved in agreement and nominal licensing, and examines how parametric variation in those features accounts for the settings and patterns that are attested crosslinguistically. Jenneke van der Wal proposes a novel syntactic analysis that takes into account not only phi agreement, but also nominal licensing and information structure. A Person feature, associated with animacy, definiteness, or givenness, is shown to be responsible for differential object agreement, while at the same time accounting for doubling vs. non-doubling object marking - a hybrid solution to a long-standing debate. In addition, low functional heads are assumed to be able to Case-license flexibly downwards or upwards, depending on the relative topicality of the two arguments involved. This accounts for the properties of symmetric object marking in ditransitives and for subject inversion constructions. The correlations between the proposed featural parameters reveal new striking patterns that provide evidence in favour of an emergentist view of features and parameters and against both Strong Uniformity and Strong Modularity.

Jenneke van der Wal, Senior Lecturer, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics

Jenneke van der Wal is a Senior Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. She obtained her PhD degree at the same institute in 2009, and has since worked on grammaticalization at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium, investigated comparative syntax and parameter hierarchies at the University of Cambridge, and taught at Harvard University. Her research combines gathering new data from various Bantu languages with developing theories on the interface between syntax and information structure.