The circumstantial forms of Tswana verbs and the notion of participle

Abstract

This article discusses the status of a set of verb forms found in Tswana and other Southern Bantu languages, designated as participial forms in the South-African Bantuist tradition. The description of the morphological and syntactic properties that distinguish the forms in question from the other inflected forms of Tswana verbs leads to the conclusion that they constitute a dependent mood that can conveniently be designated as circumstantial mood or situative mood, but for which the label ‘participial’ is quite misleading. Crucially, the forms in question show no evidence of deranking and project adverbial clauses, whereas the term ‘participle’ commonly refers to morphosyntactically deranked verb forms that can be employed for adnominal modification.