Classificatie van naamwoorden en dingen in het Bantoe

Is there a semantic foundation for the system of noun classes and genders found in Bantu (and in Niger-Congo-Kordofanian) ? This question has intensely occupied many bantuists for over a century. Fundamentalist, mentalistic, and ethnosemantic approaches were used to construct explanations. The present paper reviews several such approaches, giving particular emphasis to some old and recent Dutch contributions to this field

Change-of-state Paradigms and the middle in Kinyarwanda

This paper investigates the derivational relationships among members of verbal paradigms in Kinyarwanda (Bantu JD.61; Rwanda) by pursuing two interrelated goals. First, I describe a variety of derivational strategies for marking transitive and intransitive variants in change-of-state verb paradigms. Second, I focus on the detransitivizing morpheme –ik which serves as one possible marking for intransitive members of these paradigms. Ultimately, I argue that this morpheme is a marker of middle voice, and the variety of readings which appear with this form can be subsumed under a single operation of argument suppression. Finally, I provide a discussion of reflexives and the apparent lack of a reflexive reading with –ik by arguing that this reading is blocked by either lexical reflexives or the reflexive prefix i–