Auxiliary verb constructions in Southern Bantu

Abstract This article develops the first systematic comparative study of auxiliaries in Southern Bantu, delineating their salient properties. Southern Bantu languages are reported to have large auxiliary inventories, with sixty or more auxiliaries documented for some languages. Auxiliary functions go beyond tense, aspect, mood, and polarity to express a variety of adverbial and other meanings. Auxiliary constructions take three main patterns of complementation, with an auxiliary’s complement type only partly predictable from its semantics. Multiple auxiliaries can occur in sequence, modifying the same lexical verb. Although many of these features are found in other African languages, Southern Bantu auxiliary systems appear to be distinct from those of other languages within the Eastern Bantu clade to which they belong, raising the question of how they arose and/or were maintained.