Concord and agreement in Eastern Bantu: The augment and noun classes in Nyakyusa

The recent discussion of parameters of morphosyntactic variation motivated further scrutiny of the properties of augment and object markers available on barenouns and complex noun phrases in Nyakyusa (M31). The focus of this chapteris on the (non-)occurrence of the V-augment and CV-particle, the role of demonstratives, and the word-order within the noun phrases. The CV-particle appears toderive from the proximal demonstrative. This is confirmed by its complementarydistribution with both the proximal demonstrative and the V-augment. The mainrole of the CV-particle is to indicate contrastive focus of the referent. In addition,the anaphoric demonstrative -la ‘that/those’ occurs in complementary distributionwith the augment, as both are related to the indication of definiteness. With regardto the role of object prefixes, Nyakyusa reveals that object marking may providedefinite readings with verbs which take optional object markers (e.g. piija ‘cook’and bɪɪka ‘put’). However, definite interpretations are mandatory with verbs whichrequire obligatory object prefixes, e.g. bona ‘see’ and bʊʊla ‘inform’. Therefore, object marking is not associated with the realisation of the augment.