ABSTRACT This project is a comparative study of the ways in which the syntax of subjects and objects interacts with semantic roles and discourse functions in several Bantu languages. The objective is to test and further develop the theory that asymmetries in the syntactic behavior of verbal arguments universally arise from underlying semantic and pragmatic hierarchies which are formally associated with underspecified syntactic functions, following a line of research initiated in Bresnan and Kanerva (1989). This theory combines aspects of both the functionalist and the formalist linguistic traditions in explaining argument asymmetries in Bantu and other languages. If it is correct, the theory has significant consequences for understanding the relations of discourse, syntax, and morphology and implies that the sharp division of labor that current linguistic practice continues to impose between "sentence grammar" and "discourse grammar" has led to uninsightful or incomplete accounts of important linguistic phenomena. In research over three years the project team will systematically analyze subject and object properties in eight Bantu languages that vary in the extent of asymmetry among verbal arguments. The phenomena analyzed will include locative inversion, unaccusativity, and presentational focus; interactions of argument-adding and argument-suppressing processes; agreement, word order, and extractions; and topic and focus marking, including phonological marking.
