Staff directory
Maud Devos
Cultural anthropology & history
Culture & Society
Culture & Society
Publication details
Devos, M. & Guérois, R. 2022. ‘Micro-variation in object marking in North Mozambican Bantu languages’. In: Andrew Nevins , Anita Peti-Stantic, Mark de Vos, Jana Willer-Gold (ed), Angles of Object Agreement. Oxford : Oxford University Press, pp. 164-194. (PR) DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192897749.003.0007.
Chapter in an edited book / Article in an edited book
This chapter investigates micro-variation in object marking in 11 North Mozambican Bantu languages. The investigated parameters include morphosyntactic type of object marking, its status, and its behaviour in (lexical, applicative, and causative) ditransitive constructions. It shows that categorization of languages in a featural typology is not always straightforward. Just as symmetric languages are known to display asymmetric behavior, a detailed investigation of Koti and Shangaji, two closely related languages of the sample, shows that largely asymmetric languages may also display symmetric patches in more or less restricted contexts. The chapter points out the need for more fine-grained descriptions of variation in Bantu languages.