here - 5th International Conference on Bantu Languages

Swahili coordinated infinitives
Kristina Riedel, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (kriedel@illinois.edu) & Mark
de Vos, Rhodes University (m.devos@ru.ac.za)
Swahili exhibits a construction w<strong>here</strong> tensed verb and an infinitival are coordinated, as in (1).
This is an example of ‘unbalanced’ coordination, insofar as one verb is tensed and the other is
not.
(1) A-li-soma vitabu na ku-andika barua.
SM1-PST-read 7book and INF-write 9letter
‘S/he read books and wrote letters.’
(2) Watu wanane wa-me-uwawa na zaidi ya thelathini ku-jeruhiwa
2people 2eight SM2-PERF-kill.PASS and more 9of thirty INF-injure.PASS
‘Eight people died and more than thirty were injured’
Furthermore, the licensing of the (underlined) subject in the infinitival clause in (2)
problematizes Case Theory because infinitival clauses do not assign nominative case. The
construction is also puzzling because although it bears some characteristics of pseudocoordination
(e.g. non- commutability of conjuncts and the coordinator plays a subordinative
role) it also has properties reminiscent of true coordination (e.g. and can be substituted by or;
the first verb does not play an aspectual role; the licensing of a subject in the embedded
clause).
Despite the theoretical questions this raises, the construction has not been adequately
addressed in the literature. We argue that the conjuncts are at least coordinated TPs
dominated by AgrP which licenses case-marked subjects in both conjuncts in ways similar to
the licensing of parasitic gaps. Like English, Swahili does not license subjects in infinitival
clauses unless the subject is case-marked by a case-assigning head such as a preposition. In
the absence of such a head, the only possibility is that the subject of the infinitival must be
case-marked from outside the coordinated infinitival clause. We adopt the standard
assumptions that &P is categorially underspecified and that the label of &P reflects the labels
of the coordinated categories themselves -- in this case TP.
We conclude our discussion by comparing Swahili coordinated infinitives to similar
constructions in languages like Turkish and Korean.
GS