Micro-variation in object marking in North Mozambican Bantu languages

International audience Abstract This chapter investigates micro-variation in object marking in 11 North Mozambican Bantu languages. The investigated parameters include morphosyntactic type of object marking, its status, and its behaviour in (lexical, applicative, and causative) ditransitive constructions. It shows that categorization of languages in a featural typology is not always straightforward. Just as symmetric languages are known to display asymmetric behavior, a detailed investigation of Koti and Shangaji, two closely related languages of the sample, shows that largely asymmetric languages may also display symmetric patches in more or less restricted contexts. The chapter points out the need for more fine-grained descriptions of variation in Bantu languages.