Lutz Marten | School of Oriental and African Studies
In siSwati the accumulation of a number of changes in the morphology and syntax of locative phrases has led to a more fundamental shift of restructuring of the underlying grammatical system – the great siSwati locative shift – so that locatives in siSwati are no longer, as in Proto-Bantu and most other present-day Bantu languages, part of the noun class system, but are prepositional. This shift explains aspects of changes in the siSwati locative system which are not otherwise independently motivated, including the degrammaticalization of a historic noun class marker into a preposition and distinct relative clause marking of locatives, and provides an example of a complex, systematic historical change of a sub-system of the grammar.
2012. Locative object marking and the argument-adjunct distinction. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 30:2 ► pp. 277 ff.
Zeller, Jochen
2012. Object marking in isiZulu. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 30:2 ► pp. 219 ff.
Zeller, Jochen
2020. Syntax. In The Oxford Handbook of African Languages, ► pp. 66 ff.
Salzmann, Martin
2011. Towards a Typology of Locative Inversion – Bantu, Perhaps Chinese and English – But Beyond?. Language and Linguistics Compass 5:4 ► pp. 169 ff.
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