Variation of Object-Verb Marking in Two Kibena Varieties: the Highland Varieties and the Lowland Variety of Tanzania

Perida Mgecha Assistant Lecturer, Tumaini University Makumira, Tanzania peridamgecha@gmail.com

Received February 10, 2019; Revised February 28; 2019 Accepted March 11, 2019

Abstract: Many traditional dialectologists tend to describe language varieties in favour of phonological and lexical analysis. This paper is a comparative description of variation in object-verb agreement marking between two Kibena varieties: the Highland Varieties (HVs) and Lowland Variety (LV). Kibena is a Bantu language spoken in Tanzania mainly in the southern highlands. The paper is based on the Bantu Divergence-Convergence Theory (BDC) which was developed by Massamba (2007). The study is descriptive in nature. Purposive sampling was used to draw thirty-three informants. Data were collected through reverse translation, review elicitation and oral texts. The findings reveal that in both the HVs and the LV, object marking in some verbs is compulsory while in other cases it is optional or not allowed at all. In coordinated object noun phrase, syntactic criterion is used for object-verb marking in HVs. For LV, two strategies are employed: semantic and syntactic criteria. The variation in object-verb marking between the HVs and LV is contributed by geographical and historical factors, and language contact. Generally, this paper contributes to syntactic dialectology which is an innovative branch that could help in developing recent theories on grammatical variation.