Modal auxiliary verb constructions in East African Bantu languages

In this article we offer an overview of the use of modal auxiliary verb constructions in East African Bantu (encompassing languages spoken from eastern Congo in the north-west to northern Mozambique in the south-east; viz. Guthrie zones JD, JE, E, F, G, M, N and P). Modality, here conceptualized as a semantic space comprising different subcategories (or flavors) of possibility and necessity, has traditionally been a neglected category within Bantu linguistics, which has tended to focus instead on the more grammatical(ized) categories of tense, aspect and to a lesser extent mood. Nonetheless, our survey shows that there exists a rich number of different verbs with specialized modal functions in East African Bantu. Moreover, when comparing the variety of modal verbs in East African Bantu and the wider constructions in which they operate, many similar patterns arise. In some cases, different languages make use of cognate verbs for expressing similar modal concepts, in other cases divergent verbs, but with essentially the same source meaning(s), are employed. In addition, both Bantu-internal and Bantu-external contact have played a key role in the formation of several of the languages’ inventories of modal verbs. A typologically significant feature recurrently discovered among the languages surveyed is the tendency of structural manipulations of the same verb base to indicate semantic shift from participant-internal to participant-imposed modal flavors.