LOCATIVE INVERSION IN KIRUNDI (JD62): FORMS AND FUNCTIONS

Abstract

This article studied the formal and functional properties of a locative inversion in Kirundi. At the formal level, we were able to identify, from an analysis based on data from the corpus in Kirundi, two categories of locative inversion, namely the so-called formal locative inversion whose preverbal locative complement includes at the initial a locative prefix giving it the character of a formal locative and the so-called semantic one having a preverbal locative complement in the form of a noun phrase. At the functional level, the locative inversion serves to mark the postverbal subject as a focused element, the other members of the sentence having a discursive status varying according to the syntactic configuration of the given structure. Thus, three different types of focus have been presented as resulting from this phenomenon of locative inversion: the narrow (or argumental) focus anchored on the postverbal subject alone, the predicative focus assigned to the part comprising the verb and the postverbal subject and the sentence focus that spans the entire sentence.