PhD research: Is it syntax and/or discourse? A combined corpus and historical-comparative linguistic approach to the conjoint/disjoint alternation in East-African West Highlands Bantu

Date
October 2024 to September 2028
Countries
Category
Keywords
Great Lakes region of Eastern Africa
Bantu (language)
historical-comparative linguistics
on corpus linguistics
pragmatics
verb conjugation
syntax
aspect & tense
Institutions
University of Burundi (Burundi)
Research fields
Languages and Literatures

My PhD-project combines a corpus and historical-comparative linguistic approach to the conjoint/disjoint alternation in West Highlands Bantu, a group of closely related languages from the Great Lakes region of Eastern Africa including Kirundi and Kinyarwanda.

The in-depth study of this grammatical phenomenon involves building a new Kinyarwanda corpus and collecting new fieldwork data in four poorly known languages from Tanzania.