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This paper investigates emphatic interpretations of object marking in various Bantu languages. We focus on Lubukusu (spoken in Kenya) and Cinyungwe (spoken in Mozambique) in particular, but we also report initial evidence from other Bantu languages (mainly Tiriki, Wanga, and Ikalanga). In these languages, OM-doubling—the co-occurrence of an object marker with a lexical DP object—is infelicitous in neutral pragmatic contexts. However, we show that certain contexts make OM-doubling possible. In these contexts, OM-doubling constructions receive particular emphatic interpretations that are very different from interpretations of non-doubling object marking constructions. We identify at least four types of these interpretations: verum, mirativity, exhaustivity, and intensity. We show that emphatic interpretations of OM-doubling are widespread among Bantu languages, and we provide strategies for identifying and analyzing them. While this paper is primarily descriptive, we discuss a possible analysis of these interpretations as conventional implicatures, influenced by recent work on a similar range of emphatic interpretations arising from focus fronting in Indo-European languages.

This paper reports on the findings of a study that focused on the use of metaphtonomies of pain in Lubukusu and investigated the main attributions that are attached to patients' expression of pain during doctor-patient consultation. Data of the study were drawn from Lubukusu patients' pain metaphors that served as units of analysis. The Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) was used to select the expressions. The data analysis focused on the representation of pain through the examination of the meanings. From the data collected, three categories of metaphtonomies of pain emerged. These were; Direct Metaphor Related Words based on the Sense of Touch or Tangibility, Direct Metaphor Related Words based on the sense of Abstractness or Intangibility, and metaphor-related words. Further, it was revealed that communication mismatches occur in instances where the consultation between a non-native doctor and Lubukusu-speaking patients involved metaphors of pain. Given this, there is a need for medical practitioners and stakeholders to engage language scholars on how to address the potential gaps in healthcare discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Object markers (OMs) in Bantu languages have long been argued to be either incorporated pronouns or agreement morphemes, distinguished mainly by their ability (or not) to co-occur with (i.e. double) in situ objects. Lubukusu appears to be an instance of OMs-as-incorporated pronouns, as OMs in neutral discourse contexts cannot double in situ objects in a broad range of syntactic contexts. As we show, however, certain pragmatic contexts in fact do license OM-doubling; we demonstrate that OM-doubling in Lubukusu is licit only on a verum (focus) interpretation. We analyze OM-doubling within a Minimalist framework as the result of an Agree relation between the object and a verum-triggering Emphasis head (Emph°). The non-doubling OM results from an incorporation operation. We therefore claim that Lubukusu displays two distinct syntactic derivations of OMs (generating doubling and non-doubling) with the interpretive effects of OM-doubling arising from the semantic/pragmatic properties of Emph°. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research about the Kenyan women has primarily been conducted from socio-demographic perspectives. Such approaches, while important, are not exhaustive. This paper reports on the findings of a study that focused on the socio-linguistic perspectives that explore the place and role of women and girls in the society. Thus, this paper also set out to investigate how proverbs portray women and girls, and effect on gender identity and the implications of proverb messages to achievement of the UN Millennium Development Goals. Data of the study comprised thirty eight Bukusu and Gusii proverbs related to (dis)empowerment of women and girls; ethnography was used to select the proverbs, the data analysis focused on the representation of women through the examination of the meanings of the respective proverbs using the language dominance framework by Lakoff Zimmerman and feminist theories of the Radicals and Critical Discourse Analysis by Norman Fairclough. The findings revealed that women are portrayed as inferior, worthless and weak and thus constructed in specific roles as domestic workers, wives and caretakers. Consequently, such specific roles marginalize and discriminate women and girls in issues of decision making, participation, resource distribution and policy formulation due to the prejudice. Such discriminative proverbs slow the achievement of development goals. The paper concludes that in order to realize the UN Millennium Development Goals, there is a need to eliminate or re-conceptualize some of the proverbs which reinforce gender parity and also reform the language to suit the needs of the society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a new complementizer agreement relation to the theoretical literature from Lubukusu (Bantu, Kenya), in which a declarative-embedding complementizer agrees in an upward orientation with the subject of its selecting clause. The agreement relation is extensively documented in a wide variety of syntactic contexts including ditransitives, causatives, passives, and multiple embeddings, establishing the empirical generalization that the complementizer agrees with the most local superordinate subject. The paper proposes that this agreement relation is not a direct Agree relation, but is instead the result of local agreement between the complementizer and a null subject-oriented anaphor (whose antecedent is necessarily the superordinate subject). This is termed an Indirect Agree relation, defined as an instance of agreement between a head and an agreement trigger that is mediated by a different syntactic element (a null anaphor, in this case). A variety of evidence is given in support of this conclusion, including mismatched agreements between the complementizer and matrix subject agreement, lack of split anaphora, the properties of raising constructions, (tensed) clause-boundedness, and the intervention of specified subjects. A number of issues for future research are noted as well, including various complementation patterns relating to evidentiality, factivity, and sentience as they intersect with the properties of the agreeing complementizer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Lubukusu and Lusaamia, the wh-expression 'how' agrees in Φ- features with the subject of its clause. We show that agreement on 'how' is not always identical to subject agreement on the verb: the two diverge in certain locative inversion and subject extraction environments. On the basis of these facts, we argue that 'how' is a vP adjunct with downward-probing uΦ independent of the uΦ that underlies subject agreement. We also explore locality paradoxes that arise in connection with agreeing 'how' in locative inversion constructions. These present challenges to the traditional notion of equidistance from a probe as an explanation for inversion, show that operators may have ''active'' Φ-features even while they are A -opaque, and offer insight into the mechanisms making locative inversion possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]