Southern Bantu auxiliary functions and their distributions

Abstract

Southern Bantu languages have extensive auxiliary inventories with functions that sometimes go beyond typical tense/aspect/mood/polarity meanings. This article examines areal semantic patterns of auxiliaries in 16 Southern Bantu varieties, identifying functions that are regularly encoded by auxiliary forms. In addition to tense, aspect, modal, and negation meanings, these include sequentiality functions (‘until’, ‘after’, ‘furthermore’, and ‘meanwhile’, among others) and adverbial-like functions such as ‘quickly, soon’, ‘do well’, ‘do in vain, fail’, ‘nevertheless’, ‘rather, preferably’, and ‘just, merely’. This article aims to give a systematic overview of auxiliary functions and where they are attested across Southern Bantu, allowing for further targeted studies and cross-linguistic investigations and leading, ultimately, to a better understanding of the origins of Southern Bantu auxiliary systems.