A Glossary of Terms for Bantu Verbal Categories, with Special Emphasis on Tense and Aspect (review)

Sarah Rose, Christa Beaudoin-Lietz, and Derek Nurse (hereafter RBN) have produced a handy reference tool for students and scholars alike. Their explicit hope is ‘to contribute to the standardization of terms used in the analysis of Bantu languages’ (vii) since there is a prevalent confusion in Bantu studies due to the diversity of terms used for similar concepts, as well as that arising from different concepts being labeled by identical terms.

Following the introduction (vii–x), the glossary itself (1–92) has entries for all letters of the English alphabet, except K, Q, U, X, and Y. This is followed by a references section (93–102) and two appendices (103–6): ‘Bantu vowel systems’, which includes seven separate vowel charts, and a ‘List of languages’.

The back cover claims the glossary contains 160 substantive entries and 40 that are only cross-references. I count 173 and 33, respectively. Of the former, about 80 seem to deal specifically with tense-aspect-mood (TAM) concepts such as ‘conditional’, ‘imperfective’, and ‘semelfactive’. Other terms relate to various morphological processes or concepts which in one way or another relate to verbal constructions, such as ‘agglutinating language’, ‘auxiliary’, ‘derivation’, ‘infix’, and ‘stem’. A few entries refer to various processes that may or may not change the appearance of stems and morphemes, like ‘Dahl’s Law’ and ‘imbrication’. There are also entries for all types of meanings that can conceivably be marked morphologically in a Bantu verb, irrespective of whether they relate to TAM, such as ‘affirmative’ and ‘anaphora’. A small number of entries relate to neither TAM nor the semantic/morphological makeup of the verb or verb phrase, such as ‘language typology’, ‘northwestern (languages)’, ‘Proto-Bantu’, and a few others. These may seem like unjustified inclusions, but they are few.

The entry ‘agglutinating’ contains a morphological break-down of a Bantu verb into its various constituents. This might have served better had it been worked into the introduction as a sort of general overview of what one can expect to find in a Bantu verb.

Some entries are brief, containing a short definition, and often including a short quote from some relevant authority. The majority of entries, however, are followed by shorter or longer explications with plenty of interlinearized linguistic examples. These derive from many different Bantu languages, and RBN have wisely avoided Swahili examples as much as possible, considering that Swahili is already such a widely known Bantu language. The majority of the substantive entries contain helpful cross-references to other entries, and there are literature references in almost every one. This is not a historiographical glossary, however. Thus we do not learn the history of term usage in Bantu studies (who coined what, and so on).

This is a highly useful reference tool for students and scholars alike. The abundant use of linguistic examples and the many cross-references greatly enhance the glossary’s usefulness.