Argument structure and agency in Bemba passives

Bemba employs two passive constructions: an older one with verbal extension -w- and a more recent construction involving the class 2 subject marker ba-. We argue that ba- is ambiguous between an ordinary, referential class 2 marker, and an underspecified passive marker, and is disambiguated by the overt encoding of a class 2 subject, or an oblique semantic agent phrase. Under the passive interpretation, the semantic patient displays both subject-like and object-like properties, posing a problem for the analysis of argument structure in these constructions, and of subjects and objects in Bantu. In contrast, the -w- passive extension is increasingly used in contexts where the agent cannot be expressed, but also in combination with the neutro-passive extension -ik-, that is, with predicates with reduced valency, where it licenses the expression of an agent oblique phrase. We argue that the ba- passive is used in more typical passive contexts, while the -w- passive becomes increasingly restricted to more marginal grammatical contexts. The paper shows that both passive constructions are taking part in a wider grammaticalization process, in which two main functions of the passive, change of argument structure and encoding of agency, are becoming dissociated

Historical and Ethnographical Publications in the Vernaculars of Colonial Zambia: Missionary Contribution to the 'Creation of Tribalism'

This essay examines the chronology and attributes of literate ethno-history in Northern Rhodesia. While the earliest published authors were invariably members of missionary societies whose evangelical policies were predisposed towards the christianization of local chieftaincies, the expansion and Africanization of vernacular historiography from the late 1930s owed much to the intervention of the colonial government in the publishing sphere. A survey of their contents shows that vernacular histories and ethnographies mirrored the preconceptions and preoccupations typical of the times of their composition. By placing these texts in the political and economic context of the colony, and by providing new data on their wide circulation among literate Africans, the article contends that published ethno-histories were one of the principal cultural components of the process of crystallization of ethnic identities in the middle and late colonial era

Ethnicity, voter alignment and political party affiliation - an African case: Zambia

Conventional wisdom holds that ethnicity provides the social cleavage for voting behav-iour and party affiliation in Africa. Because this is usually inferred from aggregate data of national election results, it might prove to be an ecological fallacy. The evidence based on individual data from an opinion survey in Zambia suggests that ethnicity matters for voter alignment and even more so for party affiliation, but it is certainly not the only factor. The analysis also points to a number of qualifications which are partly methodology-related. One is that the degree of ethnic voting can differ from one ethno-political group to the other depending on various degrees of ethnic mobilisation. Another is that if smaller eth-nic groups or subgroups do not identify with one particular party, it is difficult to find a significant statistical correlation between party affiliation and ethnicity - but that does not prove that they do not affiliate along ethnic lines.Wahlverhalten und Mitgliedschaft in politischen Parteien Afrikas ist nur wenig untersucht worden. Gewöhnlich wird argumentiert, dass Ethnizität als soziale Konfliktlinie das Wahlverhalten und die Parteienmitgliedschaft strukturiert. Da dieses Argument auf hoch aggregierten Wahldaten beruht, kann hier ein ökologischer Fehlschuss vorliegen. Die vorliegende Analyse beruht deshalb auf individuellen Umfragedaten aus Sambia. Das Ergebnis ist, dass Ethnizität tatsächlich eine Rolle für das Wahlverhalten und die Parteienmitgliedschaft spielt, aber keineswegs den einzigen Erklärungsfaktor darstellt. Die Analyse offenbart zudem eine Reihe von Einschränkungen und Qualifizierungen, die teilweise methodischer Natur sind. Eine ist, dass ethnisches Wahlverhalten und Parteienmitgliedschaft von einer ethnischen Gruppe zur anderen unterschiedlich ist, dass, wenn sich kleinere ethnische Gruppen oder Untergruppen mit keiner Partei identifizieren, es schwierig wird, statistisch signifikante Korrelationen zu finden - was indessen noch nicht beweist, dass Ethnizität keine Rolle spielt

Storytelling in Northern Zambia, 1988 - 89

Digital video of storytelling performances from five Bemba-speaking groups in Zambia.Storytelling performances collected in 1988-89 from five Bemba-speaking ethnic groups: Bemba, Bisa, Bwile, Lunda and Tabwa. Soundtrack is in original language with English subtitles. Video material is the basis of a book-length study titled Storytelling in Northern Zambia: Theory, Method, Practice and Other Necessary Fictions (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2013, in the Oral Literature series, co-sponsored by the World Oral Literature Project).UC San Dieg

The conjoint/disjoint alternation and phonological phrasing in Bemba

1. Introduction Bemba is renowned as an example of a language with an extensive conjoint-disjoint alternation following earlier work in Sharman and Meeussen (1955) and Sharman (1956). The alternation is understood as the expression of complementary pairs of verb forms in particular tenses, differentiated by their distributional properties. Thus conjoint and disjoint forms are morphologically marked to distinguish their context of occurrence. Disjoint forms are generally able to occur finally in a main clause while conjoint forms are not. Associated with these distributional properties are interpretational properties revealing information structure although, as van der Wal (this volume) points out, these are properties that vary across different Bantu languages. The goal of this paper is to present the conjoint-disjoint alternation (henceforth CJ-DJ alternation) as it manifests itself in Bemba (Northern and Copperbelt dialects) and to specifically evaluate whether the alternation is encoded by tone in Bemba. Apart from segmental morphological marking of the CJ-DJ alternation in particular tenses a significant number of other tenses show tone marking that distinguishes the context of occurrence of a verb form in the same way that the CJ-DJ alternation does. This raises the question whether such tone marking should be treated as encoding the alternation and if it is not why it's distributional properties are so similar to the CJ-DJ alternation. The paper thus elaborates on the interplay between the CJ-DJ alternation, on the one hand, and prosodic marking, on the other. It will be shown that prosodic marking differs from the CJ-DJ alternation on only a limited number of properties but which, it will be argued, are significant enough to tip the balance towards segmental marking as the central way in which the CJ-DJ alternation is encoded in Bemba. The paper is organised as follows: Section 2 provides background on Bemba tonology which is relevant for the ensuing discussion; section 3 presents the morphological segmental CJ-DJ alternation markers; section 4 looks at prosodic marking with the goal of evaluating whether tone-marking independently encodes the CJ-DJ alternation; section 5 looks at the interpretational properties of the CJ-DJ alternation and also to what extent these also coincide with prosodic marking; section 6 gives the final evaluation of prosodic marking of the CJ-DJ alternation in Bemba; section 7 offers a short discussion of phrasal phonology in nominal forms; and section 8 ends the paper with some concluding remarks

Recruiting a nonlocal language for performing local identity: indexical appropriations of Lingala in the Congolese border town Goma

This article describes discursive processes by which inhabitants of the Congolese border town Goma attribute new indexical values to Lingala, a language exogenous to the area of which most Goma inhabitants only possess limited knowledge. This creative reconfiguration of indexicalities results in the emergence of three "indexicalities of the second order": the indexing of (i) being a true Congolese, (ii) toughness (based on Lingala's association with the military), and (iii) urban sophistication (based on its association with the capital Kinshasa). While the last two second-order reinterpretations are also widespread in other parts of the Congolese territory, the first one, resulting in the emergence of a Lingala as an "indexical icon" of a corresponding "language community," deeply reflects local circumstances and concerns, in particular the sociopolitical volatility of the Rwandan-Congolese borderland that renders publicly affirming one's status as an "autochthonous" Congolese pivotal for assuring a livelihood and at times even personal security. (Lingala, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Goma, orders of indexicality, language community, autochthony, Kiswahili)