Causatives, Spirantization, and Perfective Allomorphy in Silozi

Abstract

Silozi, a Bantu language spoken in Zambia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, exhibits an l~z alternation in multiple verbal suffixes. It is argued that this is not the result of a productive phonological process, but rather has a morphological motivation. We show, however, based on a large corpus of newly collected data, that the approach taken to account for similar facts in other Bantu languages cannot successfully be extended to Silozi. We conclude that the spirantization process which accounts for this allomorphy should be analyzed as the placement of multiple short causative suffixes (/-y/) within the verbal stem, even when in many cases the semantics of the verb do not reflect any causation. Finally, a residue of spirtantization cases not directly attributable to the short causative is accounted for by proposing that the perfect suffix has both a long as well as a short allomorph.