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This paper identifies a problem with a hypothesis put forward in Chomsky (2013) in relation to his labelling algorithm. Chomsky suggests that category-neutral roots do not qualify as labels and cannot project. However, I provide evidence that the derivation of particle verbs involves the projection of a category-neutral root, which has merged with (a projection of) the particle. It follows that Chomsky's hypothesis has to be rejected.

In this paper we investigate how verum is realized in Xhosa and Zulu, two Southern Bantu languages belonging to the Nguni group. The data for our study were collected through interviews with native speakers who were prompted to produce sentences in discourse contexts that typically license utterances with verum. We found that the main grammatical strategy for the expression of verum in Xhosa and Zulu involves the removal of phrasal constituents from the focus domain (the VP). This leaves the verb as the sole remaining focus host, and allows auxiliary features of the verb, such as polarity, to be marked as focus. Consequently, we analyse verum in Xhosa and Zulu as polarity focus, which is expressed indirectly, via the backgrounding of potentially focusable phrasal material. We also examined the prosodic properties of verum utterances in Xhosa. Based on findings from previous studies on Nguni intonation, we expected to observe lengthening of the penultimate vowels of phrase-final verbs and utterance-final words in our data. However, contrary to expectation, we did not find evidence of penultimate vowel lengthening in Xhosa sentences with verum, a (preliminary) result which suggests that the expression of verum may have an effect on prosody in Nguni languages.

In the post-apartheid era, South Africa has adopted a language policy that gives official status to 11 languages (English, Afrikaans, and nine Bantu languages). However, English has remained the dominant language of business, public office, and education, and some research suggests that English is increasingly being spoken in domestic settings. Concerns have therefore been raised about the future of the Bantu languages of South Africa. In this study, we use Population Census data from 1996, 2001 and 2011 to investigate whether there is evidence of a language shift to English, in the sense that English is replacing a Bantu language as the home language. We show that English language prevalence among Africans increased considerably, an increase which derives particularly from the growth in English as L2. The age distribution of L2 reporting in English, however, suggests that English as L2 is often acquired through education and time spent in the labour market, rather than in the home. Moreover, second language reporting of many of the Bantu languages also increased, and consequently, the use of almost all of the official Bantu languages has also risen. The period under review therefore is associated with greater bilingualism rather than the displacement of Bantu languages by English.

In a number of Bantu languages, object marking is correlated with a definite or specific interpretation of the agreeing object DP, and similar claims about the semantic effects of object marking have also been made for Zulu (Nguni; S42). This paper examines these claims by applying a range of diagnostic tests for (in)definiteness and (non-)specificity to sentences with object-marked objects in Zulu. The paper's first finding is that agreeing objects in Zulu can violate the uniqueness requirement that holds for definite expressions, and can therefore appear in contexts in which definite DPs are not tolerated. The second finding is that object-marked objects in Zulu can take narrow scope in relation to intensional verbs and negation, in which case they are interpreted as (scopally) non-specific. Object marking in Zulu therefore cannot be regarded as a morphosyntactic device to mark definiteness or specificity. Rather, it is suggested that the interpretative effects of object marking follow from information structure: agreeing DPs in Zulu are obligatorily dislocated and hence appear outside the focus domain (the vP). Consequently, an agreeing object in Zulu is incompatible with semantic focus, which implies that it can (but crucially, does not have to) be interpreted as denoting a discourse-familiar referent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bouba/kiki effect--the association of the nonce word bouba with a round shape and kiki with a spiky shape--is a type of correspondence between speech sounds and visual properties with potentially deep implications for the evolution of spoken language. However, there is debate over the robustness of the effect across cultures and the influence of orthography. We report an online experiment that tested the bouba/kiki effect across speakers of 25 languages representing nine language families and 10 writing systems. Overall, we found strong evidence for the effect across languages, with bouba eliciting more congruent responses than kiki. Participants who spoke languages with Roman scripts were only marginally more likely to show the effect, and analysis of the orthographic shape of the words in different scripts showed that the effect was no stronger for scripts that use rounder forms for bouba and spikier forms for kiki. These results confirm that the bouba/kiki phenomenon is rooted in crossmodal correspondence between aspects of the voice and visual shape, largely independent of orthography. They provide the strongest demonstration to date that the bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]