( SWL 1 ) Leipzig , 5-8 August 2004 Non-canonical applicatives and focalization in Tswana
This paper examines non-canonical uses of Tswana applicative verb forms that support the hypothesis of a prototypical relationship between the syntactic role of object and the pragmatic role of focus. In its canonical use, the applicative suffix of Tswana can be defined as licensing the presence of a direct object representing a participant that cannot figur in the construction of the same verb in its non-derived form. One of the non-canonical uses of applicative verb forms examined in this paper involves no change in the valency of the verb: in Tswana, as in other Southern Bantu languages, the use of the applicative form of the verb may simply indicate the focalization of a locative complement or adjunct. This non-canonical use of applicative verb forms must be related to other facts of Tswana, and more generally of Bantu languages, suggesting that in Bantu syntax the immediate post-verbal position, grammaticalized as the obligatory position of the objects of transitive verbs, is primarily a focus position.
Valence verbale et voix en tswana
Cet article decrit les proprietes syntaxiques des affixes verbaux encodant des operations sur la valence verbale en tswana, langue bantoue parlee au Botswana et en Afrique du Sud. Dans cette langue, six types d'operations sur la valence verbale sont regulierement encodes au moyen d'affixes verbaux speciaux: reflechi, reciproque, causatif, decausatif, applicatif et passif, mais ces affixes apparaissent aussi dans des constructions qui s'ecartent de leur emploi canonique; en particulier, le reflechi a developpe des valeurs moyennes de type autocausatif et decausatif, certains emplois du reciproque impliquent une modification de valence de type antipassif, la forme applicative du verbe peut s'utiliser pour focaliser un complement locatif dans des constructions n'impliquant aucun changement de valence, et les passifs impersonnels sont tres communs en tswana, en liaison avec des contraintes relativement strictes quant a la topicalite et a la referentialite des constituants nominaux en fonction de sujet.
Early Missionaries and the Ethnolinguistic Factor During the ‘Invention of Tribalism’ in Zimbabwe
There is evidence from across the disciplines that at least some of the contemporary regional names of African tribes, dialects and languages are fairly recent inventions in historical terms. This article offers some evidence from Zimbabwe to show that missionary linguistic politics were an important factor in this process. The South African linguist Clement Doke was brought in to resolve conflicts about the orthography of Shona. His Report on the Unification of the Shona Dialects (1931) shows how the language politics of the Christian denominations, which were also the factions within the umbrella organization the Southern Rhodesia Missionary Conference, contributed quite significantly to the creation and promotion of Zezuru, Karanga and Manyika as the main groupings of dialects in the central area which Doke later accommodated in a unified orthography of a unified language that was given the name Shona. While vocabulary from Ndau was to be incorporated, words from the Korekore group in the north were to be discouraged, and Kalanga in the West was allowed to be subsumed under Ndebele. Writing about sixty years later, Ranger focusses more closely on the Manyika and takes his discussion to the 1940s, but he also mentions that the Rhodesian Front government of the 1960s and 1970s deliberately incited tribalism between the Shona and the Ndebele, while at the same time magnifying the differences between the regional divisions of the Shona, which were, in turn, played against one another as constituent clans. It would appear then that, for the indigenous Africans, the price of Christianity, Western education and a new perception of language unity was the creation of regional ethnic identities that were at least potentially antagonistic and open to political manipulation. Through many decades of rather unnecessary intellectual justification, and as a result of the collective colonial experience through the churches, the schools and the workplaces, these imposed identities, and the myths and sentiments that are associated with them, have become fixed in the collective mind of Africa, and the modern nation states of the continent now seem to be stuck with them. Missionaries played a very significant role in creating this scenario because they were mainly responsible for fixing the ethnolinguistic maps of the African colonies during the early phase of European occupation. To a significant degree, these maps have remained intact and have continued to influence African research scholarship.