Festschrifts

In Hyman (2003a), I proposed a default pan-Bantu template to account for a recurrent sequencing of the Causative, Applicative, Reciprocal and Passive (CARP) suffixes, in this order. Divergences from CARP were said to result from language-specific overrides where a suffix earlier in the template has scope over a suffix later in the template. In this paper, I further examine CARP in light of data from additional Bantu languages, especially Ikalanga, Ndebele, Runyankore, Ekegusii, and the Tiania variant of Kimeru. I show, first, that although certain pairs of derivational voice suffixes such as Causative and Applicative overwhelmingly occur in the predicted CA order, others, such as Applicative and Reciprocal, occur as RA in some Bantu languages, systematically violating CARP. I conclude that rather than CARP being a template, the ordering properties need to be stated independently for each pair of suffixes on a language-by-language basis. By analyzing constraints on suffix sequences as bigrams, we can not only produce the CARP effects, when they occur, but also suffix orders that neither follow CARP nor reflect their scope relations.