Morphological Causatives in ChiBarwe:An LMT Analysis

Abstract

The distinguishing characteristic that makes Bantu languages well known is their robust morphology, which is characterised by the complex concatenation of morphemes to form words. This paper analyses morphological causatives in ChiBarwe. Morphological causatives are verb forms that express causation through morphological modifications, such as affixation, rather than separate auxiliary verbs or periphrastic constructions. ChiBarwe, a Bantu language spoken in the north-eastern parts of Nyanga District in Zimbabwe, has a rich and complex verbal system in which verbal suffixations play a central role in changing the valency of a verb. Data for this research were collected using a questionnaire, in-depth interviews, Focus Group Discussions (FGDs), the ChiBarwe Language Database, and intuition/introspection, since the researcher is a ChiBarwe speaker. Guided by lexical mapping theory, the data were analysed qualitatively. The argument avowed in this paper is that the ChiBarwe morphological causative takes a distinct phonetic shape which can be categorised into long and short causatives.