Bantu Verbal Extensions Between Morphology and Syntax

Bantu languages represent a typical example of how morphology and syntax are deeply intertwined. Indeed, these agglutinative languages employ affixes, hence morphemes, to express relations that in other languages—like Italian or English—are conveyed by independent words, in syntax. In particular, in this work, I am going to discuss Bantu causative and applicative constructions, which are formed by means of verbal extensions, i.e., affixes that adjoin to verb stems in order to derive complex syntactic structures. Through the comparison with other languages, in particular Italian and English, we will argue that a biclausal analysis of Bantu causatives is tenable and, even more, this analysis can be extended to applicative and ditransitive verbs, taking into consideration the different behaviour of symmetrical and asymmetrical Bantu languages. Finally, we will discuss the peculiar situation of Italian, which behaves like symmetrical Bantu languages as concerns object pronominalization in the complex constructions under analysis; we will conclude that the co-occurrence of clitic pronouns is linked to their different morphological forms, which suggests that they occupy different positions in the clitic/affix string, underlying once more how morphology and syntax feed each other.