Usages grammaticaux du verbe -guma ‘rester’ en kirundi (JD62) : Une étude linguistique basée sur un corpus

In Bantu languages, verbs that have a general meaning can become grammaticalized. The purpose of this study is to show that in Kirundi (JD62), the variant spoken in Burundi, the stative verb -guma ‘to stay’ can appear in given morphosyntactic structures to contribute to the production of various grammatical semantics. This article, examines the different grammatical uses of -guma based on one corpus of Kirundi texts from BantUgent. According to corpus data three grammatical uses of the verb could be identified: continuity, regularity and gradual process. First of all, the verb -guma (used as an auxiliary) marks continuity depending on its conjugation and that of the main verb. Secondly, it marks a regularity of the action described by the main verb. Finally, it is used to mark a gradual process. These grammatical functions as well as the different forms of conjugation of -guma and the main verb do not have the same frequency in the written corpus and in the oral language. The statistical distribution shows that the use of -guma as a continuity marker is more frequent both in the written corpus and in oral language compared to regularity and gradual process.