Auxiliary verb constructions in Southern Bantu
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21714502 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Thera Marie Crane (0000-0003-2142-960X, University of Helsinki , Helsinki , Finland), Hannah Gibson (0000-0003-0752-0968, University of Essex , Colchester , UK), Kristina Riedel (0000-0002-2809-0066, University of the Witwatersrand , Johannesburg , South Africa) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publication date | 2026-06-29 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Linguistic Typology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1430-0532 • E-ISSN: 1613-415X |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/lingty-2025-0036 |
| OpenAlex | W7166170953 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 35 |
This article develops the first systematic comparative study of auxiliaries in Southern Bantu, delineating their salient properties. Southern Bantu languages are reported to have large auxiliary inventories, with sixty or more auxiliaries documented for some languages. Auxiliary functions go beyond tense, aspect, mood, and polarity to express a variety of adverbial and other meanings. Auxiliary constructions take three main patterns of complementation, with an auxiliary’s complement type only partly predictable from its semantics. Multiple auxiliaries can occur in sequence, modifying the same lexical verb. Although many of these features are found in other African languages, Southern Bantu auxiliary systems appear to be distinct from those of other languages within the Eastern Bantu clade to which they belong, raising the question of how they arose and/or were maintained
Adverbial · Bantu languages · Nasalization · Salient · Verb · Archaeology and Rock Art Studies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
World Lexicon of Grammaticalization
Auxiliaries
World Lexicon of Grammaticalization
Tense and Aspect in Bantu
Auxiliary Verb Constructions
Aspect, tense and mood
The properties of adverbs and adverbial expressions in Runyambo
Auxiliary verbs in Dinka
The early history of clicks in Nguni
Divergence and contact in Southern Bantu language and population history
Auxiliary Verb Constructions (and Other Complex Predicate Types)
Auxiliary vs INFL in Bantu
Raising, unphased
The temporal role of eastern Bantu -ba and -li
Auxiliary verb constructions in the languages of Africa
Head-initial meets head-final nominal suffixes in eastern a southern Bantu from a historical perspective
The circumstantial forms of Tswana verbs and the notion of participle
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |