Linguistics of Kinyarwanda

Kyle JerroUniversity of Texas at Austin

MURI Annual Meeting November 2, 2012

Fieldwork in Rwanda• 3 Months over Summer

2012• Worked in Gitarama and

Kigali

What We’ve Learned About Kinyarwanda:

• Locative morphology has lost its prior grammatical function

• Disentangled phonological processes on certain lexical stems

• Serial verbs 1) exist and 2) are more complicated than in other Bantu

• Animals are actually humans

Applicative Morphology

• Umw-arimu y-andik-ish-a i-baruwa i-karamu.CL1-teacher CL1-write-INST-IMP CL9-letter CL6-pen“The teacher is writing the letter with a pen.”

• Umw-arimu y-andik-ish-a i-karamu i-baruwa .CL1-teacher CL1-write-INST-IMP CL6-pen CL9-letter “The teacher is writing the letter with a pen.”

Free word order of objects; differs from Kimenyi (1980) grammar

Applicative/Causative Morphology

• Ambiguities arise due to free word order• Umu-gabo a-kubit-ish-a umu-gore aba-na.

CL1-man CL1-beat-CAUS-IMP CL1-woman CL2-children“The man made the woman beat the children” OR“The man made the children beat the woman.”

Locative Morphology has Changed

• Kimenyi (1980) Style:– Aba-hungu ba-ndik-a-ho i-baruwa i-shuri.

CL2-boys CL2-write-IMP-LOC CL9-letter CL9-school“The boys are writing the letter in the school.”

• Field Work:– Aba-hungu ba-ndik-a-ho i-baruwa i-shuri.

CL2-boys CL2-write-IMP-LOC CL9-letter CL9-school“The boys are writing the letter there.”

– Mw-a-ramutse-ho.2PL-PST-spend.night-LOC“Very good morning to you.”

Lexical Stems

• Lexical stem alternation of transitivity marked with /r/ (intransitive) and /z/ (transitive)– E.g. kw-icar-a `to sit (intr)’

kw-icaz-a `to seat (tr)’

kw-itsamur-a `sneeze (intr)’kw-itsamuz-a `sneeze (tr)’

Spans a variety of lexical classes, verb types, lexical alternations

Phonology

• Phonology obscured many of these examples:Ku-zur-a `to be full (intr)’ yuzuy-e `be filled (intr)’Ku-zuz-a `to fill (tr)’ yujuj-e `filled up

(tr)’ • Rule: /r/ [y] before /e/• Rule: /z/ [j] before /e/

Serial Verbs

• Umu-hungu a-ra-ririmbir-a a-ra-rangur-a. CL1-boy CL1-PRES-sing-IMP CL1-PRES-loudly-

IMP“The boy is singing loudly.”

• Only a handful of English-style adverbs exist– Cyane (many), ejo (yesterday/tomorrow)

Agreement Clash

• In-tare y-ish-e in-zovu.CL9-lion CL1-kill-PERF CL9-elephant“The lion killed the elephant.”

• Class 9 (Animals) is starting to show Class 1 (Human) agreement – ? Intare zishe inzovu. – Happens in some dialects of Swahili (Greville

Corbett p.c.)

Conclusion

• Fieldwork and corpora studies have illuminated an array of undocumented structures.

• This new linguistic knowledge is crucial for correctly modeling the language, be it for theoretic or computational purposes.