Relative clause formation in the Bantu languages of

Abstract: This article discusses (verbal) relative clauses in the Bantu languages spoken in South Africa. The first part of the article offers a comparison of the relative clause formation strategies in Sotho, Tsonga, Nguni and Venda. An interesting difference between these language groups con-cerns the syntactic position and the agreement properties of the relative marker. Whereas the rela-tive markers in Sotho, Tsonga and Venda are clause-initial elements, which express agreement with the head noun, the relative markers in the Nguni languages are relative concords, which are pre-fixed to the verb and agree with the subject of the relative clause. The second part of the article addresses this difference and shows that there is a historical relation between these two types of relative constructions. It is argued that earlier forms of Nguni employed relative markers similar to those used in present-day Sotho and Tsonga. In Nguni, these relative markers underwent a gram-maticalisation process which turned them into relative concords. A detailed analysis of the syntactic conditions for, and the properties of, this grammaticalisation process leads to a hypothesis about the reasons why relative concords have developed in Nguni, but not (to the same extent) in Tsonga, Sotho and Venda. 1