Mchombo (linguistics, U. of California-Berkeley) offers a detailed description of the major syntactic structures of Chichewa, a language of the Bantu language group in the Benue-Congo branch of the Niger-Kordofania language family which is spoken in parts of east, central and southern Africa. Following an introductory overview of the language, the remaining chapters focus on phonetics and phonology; clause structure; relative clauses, clefts, and question formation; argument structure and verb-stem morphology; argument-structure-reducing suffixes; and the verb stem as a domain of linguistic processes. For students interested in linguistic theory and how it can be applied to a specific language. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
The main topics covered in this description of the major syntactic structures of Chichewa, a Bantu language widely spoken in Malawi, include phonetic and phonological aspects of the language, clause structure aspects, and interactions between tone and syntactic structure. Sam Mchombo's analysis is supplemented by observations about how the study of African languages, specifically Bantu languages, has contributed to progress in grammatical theory. The text covers debates about the interaction between syntax and the lexicon, as well as the contributions of African linguistic structure to the evaluation of competing grammatical theories.
This new book provides a comprehensive description of the major syntactic structures of Chichewa.
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