Circumfixes as emergent linguistic structures

Abstract

One of the manifestations of linguistic complexity is what Dahl (2004:2) describes as ‘grammatical constructions whose expression is longer than apparently necessary from a cross-linguistic perspective’. In the morphological system of Nguni languages there is a range of co-occurring affixes in both the nominal and the verbal morphological systems that seem to be unnecessary from a cross-linguistic comparison of Bantu languages in southern Africa. The relations between these co-occurring prefix and suffix pairs have not been accounted for in the traditional descriptive grammars of these languages despite the fact that their correlations are quite obvious. For the purpose of the development of morphosyntactic tags for the Nguni languages, we treated such affix pairs as discontinuous morphemes, that is, circumfixes. In this article, we would like to show that the circumfixes of the Nguni languages are typical emergent phenomena in that they ‘arose unexpectedly’ given comparable expressions in the other southern African Bantu languages, and in that they have a ‘natural origin’ from a cross-linguistic perspective. Put differently, they are the result of what Dahl (2004:27) calls ‘a symmetric mutual attunement’ of elements from similar expressions in other Bantu languages and perhaps even other African languages.