The Bantu-Romance Connection: A comparative investigation of verbal agreement, DPs, and information structure (Linguistik Aktuell Linguistics Today)

Both Bantu and Romance languages use a V(erb) S(ubject) construction to express thetic ("out-of-the-blue") sentences. Two types of languages can be distinguished within these language families, with respect to the verbal agreement in a thetic VS sentence: in type 1 the verb has default agreement, whereas in type 2 the verb agrees with the postverbal subject. In the Bantu languages these two types also display a difference in the use of conjoint and disjoint verb forms. Collins (2004), Carstens (2005), and Baker (2008) have previously analyzed such agreement and word order phenomena. These acco "This volume is the first work specifically designed to explore the extent to which striking surface morpho-syntactic similarities between Bantu and Romance languages actually represent similar syntactic structures. In particular, it explores the timely and much debated issues of verbal morphology and agreement, the structure of DPs, and word order/information structure, with the goal of providing a better understanding of the structure of the different languages investigated, and the implications this holds for syntactic theory more generally