A lexical-functional analysis of Swahili relative clauses

After an overview of Swahili's linguistic situation and a basic description of its nominal morphology, verbal morphology, and syntax, I focus on a description of relative clauses. The two basic relative clause formation strategies (the first utilizing the '-o of Reference' as a verbal infix, and the second involving 'amba-') are examined, along with their use in various semantic contexts. I then examine canonical examples of relative clauses from the literature and from corpora in order to highlight the various constraints and generalizations on the use of the different relativization strategies. The goal of these discussions is an analysis of the strategy distribution from within the syntactic framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), which itself receives a brief overview. For the analysis, I lay out the basic phrase structure rules that characterize Swahili syntax from the perspective of LFG. Important questions are the status of the '-o' particle and the word 'amba-'. I argue, contrary to e.g., Barrett-Keach (1980), where amba- is considered to be a verb, that amba- is in fact a relative pronoun appearing in the specifier of CP. This structural configuration triggers the activation of various rules which predict the grammaticality of relative clause word orders. In other words, the difference between verbal infix relatives and amba- relatives is primarily structural; in verbal infix relative constructions, -o is also taken to be a relative pronoun. This analysis is made coherent by claiming that Swahili syntax regularly makes use of resumptive pronouns, e.g., when both amba- and -o are used in a single construction, and this notion is formalized using LFG's 'r-structure' (reference structure). In evaluating the analysis given in this thesis, I point out problems with the data used in the literature to argue for different positions. It is in many cases uncertain whether there is a clear grammaticality judgment, and this opens up the possibility that competing analyses capture the data in non-insightful ways. That being said, this work shows that an analysis of the facts within the framework of LFG is not only possible but also renders the linguistic claims made by the analysis more perspicuous than on other approaches.