Variation in Subject-Verb Agreement Marking in Two Kibena Dialects: The Highland Dialect and the Lowland Dialect

Abstract

Many traditional dialectologists tend to describe language dialects in favour ofphonological and lexical analysis. This paper is a comparative description ofvariation in subject-verb agreement marking between two Kibena varieties: theHighland Dialect (HD) and Lowland Dialect (LD). This study is guided by theBantu Divergence-Convergence Theory. The findings reveal that in both theHD and the LD, subject prefixes obligatorily co-occur with all personalpronouns and all noun classes. Unlike in HD, nouns denoting animals takeagreements from class 1/2 in LD. For coordinated subject noun phrase,semantic and morphological criteria are used for subject-verb agreementmarking in HD. For LD, three strategies are employed: semantic, syntactic andmorphological criteria. The variation in agreement marking between the HDand LD is contributed by geographical and historical factors, as well aslanguage contact. This analysis provides evidence that both HD and LD arestill varieties of Kibena.