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On parametric variation in Bantu, with particular reference to Kinyarwanda
Author(s) -
Zeller Jochen,
Ngoboka Jean Paul
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
transactions of the philological society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.333
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-968X
pISSN - 0079-1636
DOI - 10.1111/1467-968x.12048
Subject(s) - bantu languages , variation (astronomy) , morpho , syntax , linguistics , computer science , sample (material) , point (geometry) , grapheme , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , mathematics , physics , philosophy , geometry , optics , thermodynamics , graphene , quantum mechanics , astrophysics
Marten, Kula and Thwala (2007) compare the morphological and syntactic properties of ten Bantu languages by postulating 19 micro‐parameters with binary values, which capture many of the grammatical differences between the languages in their sample. In our paper, we extend the empirical basis of their study by describing the morpho‐syntax of the Bantu language Kinyarwanda (D61) with respect to the same 19 micro‐parameters. We then make a proposal about the insights that can be gained from comparative studies of this kind. We suggest that systematically organised data about micro‐variation in Bantu offer the opportunity to discover correlations between grammatical properties from which descriptive generalisations can be derived. These generalisations shed light on the abstract principles that determine linguistic variation and may lead to hypotheses about underlying ‘major’ parameters which control whole clusters of grammatical surface differences between groups of languages. We also discuss a number of examples of (unidirectional and bidirectional) correlations that we have found in the data, which point to interesting links between morpho‐syntactic phenomena such as agreement, relativisation, and word order in the Bantu languages.