Abstract
Bantu applicatives are standardly analysed syntactically, as encoding a change in valency. However, in many cases applicatives do not change valency, but are rather related to a change in interpretation. In particular pragmatic functions of applicatives related to focus and emphasis are often noted in the description of individual languages, but are very rarely reflected in typological or theoretical work. To address this problem, this paper develops a pragmatic analysis of applicatives, in which applicatives signal that the action denoted by the base verb is being carried out in some way remarkably, and so differently from normal expectations about the action. Pragmatic effects are found with all uses of applicatives, and may lead to a change in valency, or not. Absence of a change in valency is found in particular with locative and instrument applicatives, while benefactive applicatives almost always entail a change in valency. This is related to the thematic hierarchy: Beneficiaries occupy a high position in the thematic hierarchy and have a strong effect on the expectedness of the action expressed. The advantage of our analysis is that it addresses both interpretational and structural aspects of applicative constructions and provides a unified explanation for them.
Acknowledgements
Research reported in this paper was partly supported by Leverhulme Research Project Grant RPG-2014-208 ‘Morphosyntactic variation in Bantu: Typology, contact and change’ awarded to the first-named author, which is hereby grateful acknowledged. We are grateful for comments and discussion of ideas developed in this paper to Hannah Gibson, Chege Githiora, Rozenn Guérois, Nancy Kula, Irina Nikolaeva, Teresa Poeta, Jenneke van der Wal, and Jochen Zeller, as well as to audiences at the Linguistics Research Student Conference @ SOAS, May 2014, the joint SAALA/SAALT/LSSA Conference, University of the Witwatersrand, June 2014, WOCAL 7, Kyoto University, August 2015, and the University of Nairobi, December 2015. Any shortcomings of the paper remain our own.
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