The Syntax of Chichewa

The main topics covered in this description of the major syntactic structures of Chichewa, a Bantu language widely spoken in Malawi, include phonetic and phonological aspects of the language, clause structure aspects, and interactions between tone and syntactic structure. Sam Mchombo's analysis is supplemented by observations about how the study of African languages, specifically Bantu languages, has contributed to progress in grammatical theory. The text covers debates about the interaction between syntax and the lexicon, as well as the contributions of African linguistic structure to the evaluation of competing grammatical theories.

1. Introduction; 2. Phonetics and phonology; 3. Clause structure; 4. Relative clauses, clefts and question formation; 5. Argument structure and verb stem morphology; 6. Argument structure reducing suffixes; 7. The verb stem as a domain of linguistic processes.