The Syntax of Anaphors in Ki-Imenti: A Bantu Language Spoken in Kenya

This paper is an investigation of the distribution of anaphors in Ki-Imenti.  Ki- Imenti is a Bantu language spoken in Meru Central, North Imenti and Buuri sub-counties, Meru County. It is one of the dialects of Kimeru. The objective of this paper is to determine the syntax of anaphors in Ki- Imenti. The study is guided by Chomsky’s Binding Theory. The binding theory divides noun phrases into three basic categories anaphors, pronouns and R-expressions. This theory develops three binding principles to explain the distribution of these noun phrases. These are the binding principle A, binding principle B and binding principle C. This study is only limited to the distribution of anaphors. The study adopts a qualitative study research design as it gives detailed descriptions and explanations of the phenomena studied. The researcher generated the data for the study herself using self-introspection and the data was corroborated by ten native speakers who were purposively sampled. The paper has established that Ki-Imenti conforms to the binding principles. Anaphors are bound in their binding domain, whereby the binding domain is the inflectional phrase or the noun phrase containing the anaphor. This paper will make a contribution to the knowledge of the syntax of anaphors in Ki- Imenti and the description of the syntax of Bantu linguistics in general.