1

Course Programme 1st session

PLEASE REGISTER HERE



ARGUMENT STRUCTURE, TRANSITIVITY AND CAUSATION IN SOUTHERN BANTU



Professor Marianna Visser, University of Stellenbosch

Preliminary Schedule for Bantu Syntax (Monday, May 30 through Friday, June 3, 10.15-12.00):

The lectures will deal with two broad themes

1. Sessions 1-4:

Issues on transitivity and argument realization in syntactic alternation constructions with special attention to predicates of causation and their corresponding decausatives. Selected examples from isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, Setswana and Tshivenda will be considered.

1.1 Problems as regard the convential views on transitivity will be addressed with reference to a range of intransitive and transitive verbs, including derived transitive verbs with the applicative and causative suffixes.

1.2 Morphologically distinct verbs of causation and their decausative counterparts will be examined with regard to transitivity and event structure properties.

1.3 The issues in 1.1 and 1.2 will be extended to a comparative analysis of ideophones in various Southern Bantu languages.

1.3.1 Ideophones exhibit a rich variety of exceptional properties as regard

(i) verbal inflectional agreement such as subject agreement, object agreement, negative inflection, and the optionality of the omissibility of this inflection morphology.
(ii) verbal derivational morphology: the Southern Bantu languages exhibit distinct properties with respect to the ability of the inflection-bearing (verbal) element (thi/-re) of ideophones in allowing derivational suffixes, like the applicative, causative and passive.

1.3.2 Ideophones in some Southern Bantu languages pose interesting questions as regard argument structure realization on grounds of their derivation from corresponding verbs.

1.3.3 Ideophones may occur in syntactic alternation constructions that illustrate causation vs decausation distinctions that correlate with the event structure properties of these predicates.

1.4 Motion verbs in location-subject alternation constructions are examined as regard their properties of causation and event structure.

2. Session 5: Nominalisations
Questions as regard the morphological noun class prefix and suffix and semantic properties of derived nouns will be addressed.