Monday, May 6th @ 3 PM, Wieboldt 408

An Overview of Nguni Verbal Reduplication with Special Reference to Ndebele

Previous works on verbal reduplication in Nguni (isiNdebele, siSwati, isiXhosa and isiZulu) such as Downing (1996, 1997a) and Sibanda (2004) have not paid much attention to possible verbal morphology inaccuracies but have been concerned mainly with theoretical aspects of reduplication from a phonological, morpho-phonological or morpho-syntactic perspective. The assumption has been that the morphological analyses in, for example, Doke (1931 (and later editions)) and Ziervogel (1952) are correct. In this presentation I begin by questioning the morphological analyses themselves taking into account results from diachronic studies, specifically Proto-Bantu reconstructions. I focus on verbs with vowel initial stems and those with sub-minimal -C- roots. For example, the reduplicated form of the stem -dla ‘eat’ has previously been assumed to have the morphological structure -dla-yi+dla but I argue, drawing from historical evidence, that this should be -dla+yidla. A morphological reanalysis of the data could potential pose problems for any theory. However, using mainly isiNdebele examples, I show that the Morphological Doubling Theory (Inkelas and Zoll 2005) which places less emphasis on Base-RED phonological identity still handles the Nguni data well in spite of the morphological changes suggested.