Khwe

Khwe uses four of five cross-linguistically attested strategies of participant marking: (1) Constituent order is relevant only in basic sentences. (2) Most postpositions assign a semantic role to peripheral participant, whereas the postposition à marks a core participant. (3) There is one instance of suffixation: The oblique case suffix -à or the gender suffixes -B and -cì mark a peripheral participant which may precede a postposition or is a nominal attribute. (4) Finally, derivation through suffixes attached to the verb stem is used to vary the semantics of the verb, which may also result in a manipulation of the valency of the verb. The fifth strategy – verb-serialization – only applies in combination with the verb *ma / *mō´ as a lexical source for a derivational suffix.

Published online: 22 April 2009
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.110.10kil