The grammaticalisation of verb-auxiliary order in East African Bantu: from information structure to tense-aspect

Bantu languages employ a combination of simple and compound verb forms to encode tense-aspect-mood distinctions. Compound constructions typically involve an auxiliary form followed by an inflected main verb. However, the six East African Bantu languages under examination in this paper exhibit a typologically and comparatively unusual construction in which the auxiliary appears after the verb. This paper presents a synchronic description of this word order and develops an account of its possible origins. It is proposed that the verb-auxiliary order originated from a verb-fronting construction which was used historically to convey predication focus. The account further corroborates the claim that the progressive aspect is an inherently focal category in Bantu and from a wider perspective, shows the interplay between the encoding of information structure and tense-aspect information.