Proto-Bantu

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    On Reconstructing Proto-Bantu Grammar
    (2022-12-30) Bostoen, Koen de Schryver, Gilles-Maurice Guérois, Rozenn Pacchiarotti, Sara; Pacchiarotti, Sara; Guérois, Rozenn; de Schryver, Gilles-Maurice
    This book is about reconstructing the grammar of Proto-Bantu, the ancestral language at the origin of current-day Bantu languages. While Bantu is a low-level branch of Niger-Congo, the world’s biggest phylum, it is still Africa’s biggest language family. This edited volume attempts to retrieve the phonology, morphology and syntax used by the earliest Bantu speakers to communicate with each other, discusses methods to do so, and looks at issues raised by these academic endeavours. It is a collective effort involving a fine mix of junior and senior scholars representing several generations of expert historical-comparative Bantu research. It is the first systematic approach to Proto-Bantu grammar since Meeussen’s Bantu Grammatical Reconstructions (1967). Based on new bodies of evidence from the last five decades, most notably from northwestern Bantu languages, this book considerably transforms our understanding of Proto-Bantu grammar and offers new methodological approaches to Bantu grammatical reconstruction.
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    Predicate Partition For Predicate-Centred Focus And Meeussen's Proto-Bantu "Advance Verb Construction"
    (2022-12-30) Güldemann, Tom; Fiedler, Ines
    Meeussen’s (1967: 121) extensive grammatical reconstructions for Proto-Bantu contain a so-called “advance verb construction” that is comprised of an infinitive followed by a finite form of the same verb (typologically commonly called “cognate”verb) and conveys a marked type of information structure (IS) in which a predicate component is highlighted pragmatically. While Güldemann (2003: 335–337) already characterised this construction to pertain to the IS subdomain of so-called “predicate-centred focus”, he had to leave open some important structural and functional details. Since then, much more relevant data have become available, both inside and outside of Bantu. In this chapter, we attempt to specify Meeussen’s (1967) proposal about his “advance verb construction” and its “relatives” by providing a cross-linguistic perspective of the relevant domain, presenting and analysing a wide range of relevant structures from across the Bantu family, and finally discussing the results of this comparative family survey regarding both the synchronic variation and the diachronic dynamics of change.