Freitag, 12.30-13.30
Bantu possesses a verbal lexeme wich is widely distributed in this family of languages and the sound shape of which could be reconstructed inter alia by Guthrie (1967-71) as *-ti. In many languages it plays a prominent role in the domain of speech-reporting but is also used in a great variety of other, frequently highly grammaticalized contexts. The treatment of this element in grammatical descriptions and dictionaries of various languages reveals its astonishing semantic and functional versatility and at the same time the enormous problems encountered by many scholars in assigning a consistent meaning to it. This paper is an attempt to bring order to the multitude of idiomatic uses and grammatical functions of ti. It is based predominantly on data from Shona - the major language of Zimbabwe showing a particularly high functional load and discourse frequency of word forms incorporating ti, but also includes comparative data from other Bantu languages. The findings of this analysis allow an interpretation of the meaning of ti, which is different from most of the semantic accounts of this element presently available in individual languages. The implications of this lexical characterization in turn has an important bearing on current theoretical accounts of grammaticalization processes that are observable cross-linguistically at the intersection of the two functional domains of speech reporting and clause linkage.
e-mail: gueldema@rz.uni-leipzig.de
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