How do words get in order? The role of speaker-hearer interaction in languages of southern Africa

This study will investigate how word order interacts with morphological marking and phonological phrasing, and how this correlates with information structure in the Nguni subgroup of Bantu languages in South Africa. Research dedicated to information structure is largely lacking for these languages.

The study includes the checking of existing hypotheses against natural spoken data, as well as micro-comparative research in varieties which – although closely related – differ in their morphological marking in ways relevant for information structure.

A corpus of spoken data collected by the applicant forms the back-bone of material, complemented by interviews in three varieties of Nguni.

Such interviews and analysis are carried out in a collaborative effort during 3-years by Bloom-Ström, Crane and Zeller, who are specialized in Xhosa, Southern Ndebele and Zulu, respectively. All have expertise in the factors that are crucial in the organization of word order.

Their respective recent findings will now come together in a unique opportunity to address unanswered questions in the language group. Findings will be interpreted in a cross-linguistic and typological perspective.

The outcome will inform current debates in information structure and increase our knowledge of what controls word orders in languages with high word order flexibility, by bringing in systematic data from a language family on which relatively little semantic/pragmatic research has been carried out.