Passivisation in Tanzanian Chingoni
This study investigates passivisation in the Tanzanian Chingoni language (N12), a relatively underexplored area in the language. We specifically aim to explore the strategies for encoding the passive and determine their extent of use. We employed two methods of data collection: elicitation from thre...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Taylor & Francis Group
2025-12-01
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| Series: | Cogent Arts & Humanities |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/23311983.2025.2515113 |
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| Summary: | This study investigates passivisation in the Tanzanian Chingoni language (N12), a relatively underexplored area in the language. We specifically aim to explore the strategies for encoding the passive and determine their extent of use. We employed two methods of data collection: elicitation from three proficient Chingoni speakers, and documentary review. Through elicitation, we gathered data from two males and one female speaker, all aged above 55 years. The elicitation process involved prompting participants to transform active sentences into passive constructions, allowing for exploration of alternative grammatical forms. Through documentary review, three publications written in Chingoni were consulted. Our findings reveal that Chingoni employs at least three strategies for expressing passivisation. These are morphological passivisation, which is encoded through specific morphological modification to the verb; impersonal passivisation where a class 2 subject marker coreferencing an unspecified human agent is used; and subject-verb inversion, which positions the object at the beginning of sentences, thus producing an (O)VS word order. These insights broaden our horizon of understanding the mechanisms for encoding passivisation in Bantu languages. |
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| ISSN: | 2331-1983 |