Relative clauses in Bantu: affixes as relative markers

Abstract

In this work I am going to investigate relative clauses in Bantu languages, with special regard to two of them, Tshiluba and Swahili.1 Interestingly, in these languages the relative marker is not an independent element, as in Romance or Germanic languages, but rather a morphologically bound affix. At a closer look, this does not come as an excessive surprise, in that all unstressed pronominal elements encoding syntactic relations, like subject, object or locative, which are clitic in Romance, have affix status in Bantu. However, the fact that the relative marker is a bound affix bears non-negligible consequences on the morphology of the verb contained in the relative clause.