Syntactic Focus Marking Strategies and Non-canonical Structure in Kiswahili

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore the non-canonical structures triggered by syntactic focus marking strategies, including dislocations, complement inversion, clefting and verb doubling. In many Bantu languages, these strategies are known to alter the canonical word order. For example, in Nsong (B85d), left dislocation changes Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) to Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) and Subject-Object-Verb (SOV), while clefting in Kisikongo (H16a) yields structures such as SVO to OVS, VO and VOS. However, the word order structures derived from Swahili's syntactic focus marking strategies have received limited scholarly attention. To address this, the study aimed to identify and describe the non-canonical word order produced by syntactic focus marking strategies. The data of this study were collected from two narrative texts: the narrative of Mwanamalundi and that of the MV. Bukoba accident. The framework used to analyse data was the Phonetic Form Scrambling Theory proposed by Kidwai (2000). The finding reveals that left dislocation changes SVO to OVS, OV, and OSV. Also, clefting changes SVO to OVS, VOS and SVS. Lastly, complement inversion changes Subject-Verb-Clause (SVC) to Clause-Verb-Subject (CVS). The study establishes that focus marking strategies play a crucial role in restructuring Swahili word order, which contributes to the formation of diverse non-canonical structures.