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Maud Devos
Cultural anthropology & history
Culture & Society
Culture & Society
Publication details
Bernander, R., Devos, M. & Gibson, H. 2022. ‘Modal auxiliary verb constructions in East African Bantu languages’. Journal of African languages and Literatures 3: 22-85. ISSN: 2723-9764. DOI: https://doi.org/10.6093/jalalit.v3i3.9153. (PR).
Article in a scientific Journal / Article in a Journal
In this article we offer an overview of the use of modal auxiliary verb
constructions in East African Bantu (encompassing languages spoken from
eastern Congo in the north-west to northern Mozambique in the south-east;
viz. Guthrie zones JD, JE, E, F, G, M, N and P). Modality, here conceptualized as
a semantic space comprising different subcategories (or flavors) of possibility
and necessity, has traditionally been a neglected category within Bantu
linguistics, which has tended to focus instead on the more grammatical(ized)
categories of tense, aspect and to a lesser extent mood. Nonetheless, our
survey shows that there exists a rich number of different verbs with
specialized modal functions in East African Bantu. Moreover, when
comparing the variety of modal verbs in East African Bantu and the wider
constructions in which they operate, many similar patterns arise. In some
cases, different languages make use of cognate verbs for expressing similar
modal concepts, in other cases divergent verbs, but with essentially the same
source meaning(s), are employed. In addition, both Bantu-internal and Bantu external contact have played a key role in the formation of several of the
languages’ inventories of modal verbs. A typologically significant feature
recurrently discovered among the languages surveyed is the tendency of
structural manipulations of the same verb base to indicate semantic shift
from participant-internal to participant-imposed modal flavors.