OBJECT MARKING IN BANTU

a systematization of the phenomenn in Changana

Abstract

Object marking is a common linguistic phenomenon in Bantu languages, in which the object of a sentence is referenced in the verbal structure through a prefix. The aim of this article is to systematize the descriptions of the phenomenon of object marking in Changana. To this end, we compiled the morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic contexts in which object marking emerges in the language, based on a bibliographic review of studies by Chimbutane (2002), Ngunga and Simbine (2012), Langa (2013), and Ngunga, Duarte, and Quesler (2016). The descriptions of the phenomenon indicate that object marking serves to encode topical interpretation, as the argument marked on the verb represents given information in the discourse. In this context, the referenced object may have optional morphophonological realization in the sentence as a full NP, since the object marker makes it possible to recover the reference of the marked NP. This phenomenon occurs in transitive or transitivized sentences and in double object constructions. Furthermore, object marking allows flexibility in the order of constituents, as the marker's coreferentiality ensures the interpretation of the marked NP as the object of the sentence. Finally, we identified a divergence regarding the grammatical status of the object marker, with two proposals: one characterizes the marker as an incorporated pronoun, while the other considers it as concord marker. Thus, the systematization of the information proposed in this article serves as a basis for further studies on object marking.