Aspectual auxiliary verbs in Xitsonga

In Xitsonga, certain Aspectual Auxiliary verbs (AA verbs) appear with double subject agreement. While these AA verbs have been reported in the description of Xitsonga (Baumbach 1987: 250-252), a systematic morphosyntactic study of these constructions has not been undertaken. This study aims to fill this gap. An AA verb is marked with tense, aspect, mood, negation and relative clause markers and may occur in wh-questions. The lexical verb following the AA verb may be the target of verbal extensions (applicative and reciprocal), reflexive, causative and passive markers.Keywords: Aspectual Auxiliary (AA) verbs, Xitsonga, morphosyntax, doubling of subject agreemen

Distribution of conjunctive and disjunctive forms in Xitsonga

The conjunctive and disjunctive forms in Xitsonga are examined with the purpose of presenting the distribution of these forms. While verbs in the conjunctive form are followed by some elements, the disjunctive is used when no element follows the verb. Xitsonga follows these basic patterns observed in other Bantu languages, but previous theories cannot explain all of the cases in which the conjunctive and disjunctive forms are distinguished. In previous work, three major approaches have been proposed: the constituency approach, the focus-based approach, and the information packaging approach. Xitsonga supports but also provides counterevidence to all of these approaches. This paper also re-examines the claim that the presence of conjunctive/disjunctive distinctions only exists in the present tense. Following Creissels (2014), we report that the conjunctive/disjunctive dichotomy is present in other tenses as well when prosodic patterns such as penultimate lengthening are further examined.Keywords: Xitsonga, conjunctive, disjunctive, information packaging theor