Edited by Cécile De Cat and Katherine Demuth
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 131] 2008
► pp. 111–128
Romance and Bantu languages show a range of contrasting morphological and syntactic properties, ranging from WH extraction strategies and the existence of V2 to directionality of affixation and degree of fusion and agglutination in verbal inflectional morphology. Using Isizulu and Chishona (Bantu) and standard French and Italian (Romance) as examples, this paper correlates these contrasts in terms of a common right-branching Split-INFL structure, and contrasting preferences for movement (STAY, in Optimality Theoretic terms). It is proposed that the same preference which motivates WH extraction strategies in the four languages also motivates the contrast between the relatively prefixal and agglutinative verbal inflectional morphology of Isizulu and Chishona and the suffixal and more fusional verbal inflectional morphology of French and Italian. The conclusions reinforce intuitions that languages belonging to the Romance and Bantu language families are typologically similar.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 6 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.