Abstract: In the early days of African linguistics, researchers debated as to whether or not the Bantu languages under study were agglutinative, with words made up of a long string of morphemes, or more isolating with clauses having more independent words (Doke 1929, Guthrie 1948). For the most part, this debate has been won by those in favor of the agglutinative structure, though researchers have specified that for some languages there may be differences between phonological and morphological (or syntactic) words (Myers 1995, Hyman and Katamba 2005). Bantu languages are assumed to minimally have a verb stem preceded by subject and tense markers. This structure is illustrated by an example from Swahili (G.40), an eastern Bantu language.
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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