MORPHOSYNTACTIC MARKING OF TOPIC IN KIRUNDI (JD62)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.71105/Keywords:
topicalization, topic, topic markingAbstract
This article, using a linguistic analysis guided by the corpus, aims to systematically describe the different types of topics in use in Kirundi and the morphosyntaxic means that come into play for their marking. It also consists of identifying the parts of speech that can be elevated to the status of the topic in this Bantu language. The results of this analysis show that Kirundi syntactically employs two types of topics: the external topic (TE)
obtained after the dislocation to the left of a syntactic constituent in the sentence and the internal topic (TI) naturally corresponding to the grammatical subject of the sentence. verb. The study also shows that only the arguments of the verb, in general, and the complement of the noun, can play the role of topic in the sentence of Kirundi.
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