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Part of
Structuring Variation in Romance Linguistics and Beyond: In honour of Leonardo M. Savoia
Edited by Mirko Grimaldi, Rosangela Lai, Ludovico Franco and Benedetta Baldi
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 252] 2018
► pp. 85–96

Chapter 5
Negation and negative copulas in Bantu

| University of Urbino
The main aim of this work is to further speculate on the many syntactic similarities, already discussed in previous work, which may be observed in Bantu and Romance languages. In particular, this work analyses the expression of negation in Bantu, a phenomenon which involves different elements and multiple positions. Crucially, Bantu negation is generally encoded in a specialized prefix, which shows up at the left edge of the complex verbal form; however, negation may also interfere either with tense feature – at least in languages, like Swahili, which exhibit morphologically different tense/aspect infixes in affirmative and negative clauses – or with modality, encoded in the final inflection. This recalls the situation observed also in Romance varieties and especially in Northern Italian dialects.
Keywords: negation, Bantu languages, copulas, Northern Italian dialects, tense/aspect infixes
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Copulas and negation
  • 3.Negative inflected forms
  • 4.A Bantu-Romance comparison
    • 4.1Jespersen’s cycle
    • 4.2Initial negation
    • 4.3Medial negation
    • 4.4Final negation
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.252.05coc
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