[Draft, August 2020; to appear in Lutz Marten, Rozenn Guérois, Hannah Gibson & Eva-Marie Bloom-Ström (eds), Morphosyntactic Variation in Bantu. Oxford: Oxford University Press.] The use of the augment in Nguni languages with special reference to the referentiality of the noun Eva-Marie Bloom Ström & Matti Miestamo Abstract This chapter examines the use of the augment, a prefix preceding the noun class prefix, in a number of language varieties in the Nguni subgroup of Bantu languages. The study of these closely related varieties, which show striking similarities as well as differences in the use of the augment, gives new insights into developmental tendencies of the augment. All contexts in which the augment can be omitted are non-fact contexts. Contrary to what has previously been argued for some varieties, however, we find that the presence vs. absence of the augment does not mark a referentiality distinction. It is argued that referentiality constitutes a semantic and pragmatic explanation to the absence and presence of the augment in different contexts in a diachronic perspective, but that this function is eroded in present-day Nguni. What remains is a limited referentiality distinction for some speakers in some varieties. The loss of function explains why the augment is included in the noun in nearly all contexts in some varieties, and omitted everywhere in others. Due to its loss of function, the augment has become free to participate in sociolinguistic and stylistic variation in some Bantu languages. Key-words: negation, non-fact, referentiality, augment, morphosyntax, Nguni 1. Introduction The aim of this paper is to explore the connection between the use of a nominal prefix in Bantu referred to as the augment1 and (non-)referentiality, such as has been claimed to exist in Swati: 2 (1) a. a-ba-hlab-i i-n-komo (ref, indef) [Swati] NEG-SM2-slaughter-NEG 9AUG-9-cow ‘They do not slaughter a beast.’ b. a-ba-hlab-i n-komo (non-ref) NEG-SM2-slaugher-NEG 9-cow ‘They do not slaughter any beast.’ c. a-ba-yi-hlab-i i-n-komo (ref, def) NEG-SM2-OM9-slaugher-NEG 9AUG-9-cow ‘They do not slaughter the beast.’ (Ziervogel 1952: 187) 1 Also referred to as pre-prefix or initial vowel. 2 We use the following additional abbreviations in this paper: AS= associative; CONN= connective; IDEO= ideophone; IT= itive; OBL= obligative mood; PRT= participial; RC=relative concord; REC= recent past; REF= referential demonstrative. When interlinear glossings are available in publications we have adhered to the categories used by the author in question, with slight adaptation to our abbreviations. In other cases, such as with Swati examples in Ziervogel and Mabuza (1976), we have added glossing based on their grammatical description, with additional help from the dictionary by Rycroft (1981). 1 In the negative and other irrealis contexts, the omission of the augment such as in ((1)b) gives a non-referential meaning as opposed to when the augment is present ((1)a). The cross- reference of the object noun on the verb, in combination with the presence of the augment, gives a definite meaning ((1)c). Similar distinctions are reported for Xhosa, Zulu and many other Bantu languages, as we shall see below. We take a referential noun to be a noun that is used by the speaker when s/he has a specific referent in mind. With a non-referential noun this is not the case. In order to examine the connection between the augment and referentiality further, we zoom in on the Nguni subgroup (S40) of Bantu languages. The Nguni group consists of a number of closely related languages and varieties, some of which are relatively well studied. This makes this group especially well fitted for a micro- comparative approach to the use of the augment. In such an approach we can study minimally varying systems, most other things being equal. The Nguni group shows striking similarities as well as contrasts in the shape and the use of the augment across the varieties and is thereby optimal for a micro-comparative approach to the augment. The nouns in Bantu languages are categorized in noun classes; each noun class is characterized by its specific noun class prefix. In a subset of Bantu languages this noun class prefix is preceded by a morpheme that often consists of a single vowel and is referred to as the augment (de Blois 1970). There has been considerable interest in this morpheme in the literature on Bantu languages. Its occurrence vs. non-occurrence “often involves an intricate interplay between phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic/pragmatic factors” (Hyman and Katamba 1993: 209) as well as perhaps sociolinguistic factors (Petzell and Kühl 2017). The contexts in which the augment is used vary across the language family and it has proved difficult to give a unified syntactic or semantic/pragmatic account of its function (van de Velde 2018; Halpert Forthcoming). The link between the augment and (non-)referentiality as exemplified in ((1)) and previously suggested for Bantu languages (Givón 1973; 1978; Ndayiragije et al. 2012) has in our view not been enough explored. In a recent typological survey, the presence vs. absence of the augment in nouns under negation was related to the way in which other languages mark a noun phrase as non-referential under negation (Miestamo 2014). In this paper we develop this idea and analyze the use of the augment in negation and other non-fact contexts in Nguni. We argue that in the contemporary Nguni varieties surveyed, the presence vs. absence of the augment on the clausal level is synchronically determined mainly by the morpho-syntactic construction used. There is a functional and semantic explanation as to why the augment is dropped in certain contexts, i.e. to signal non-referentiality, but this function of the augment has largely eroded and is no longer prominent in the varieties we have studied. The functional explanation of the synchronic distributions is thus mainly of a diachronic nature. The loss of this distinguishing semantic function of the augment can explain why its use has taken such wildly different courses in even very closely related varieties. It can also explain why the patterns underlying its (non-)use are sometimes hard to capture and why it has assumed sociolinguistic functions for speakers of some Bantu languages. We suggest that the results of this paper are indicative of a grammatical change reducing the functional load of the augment, but it is outside our present scope to develop a comparative-historical analysis of such a change. However, a semantic/pragmatic distinction still remains in certain morphosyntactic environments, but possibly not for all speakers of the respective varieties. There is also a distinction present – at least for some speakers – relating to information structure, in that contrastive focus can be expressed by the use of the augment in the negative. Our study adds to the typological knowledge of how the languages of the world mark referentiality. Also, while not providing a systematic and detailed account of how 2 referentiality and definiteness are expressed in the Nguni varieties, it aims to contribute to solving the puzzle of how the Bantu languages – which lack articles – express these distinctions. The augment has long been assumed to play a large role in this, see section 2.2. Other elements with relevance for marking the referentiality of the nominal element in Bantu, although this is still an under-researched topic, include the demonstrative (e.g. Visser 2008; Asiimwe 2014) as well as the role of word order and different kinds of morphosyntactic constructions such as the existential (Bloom Ström Forthcoming 2020). Their role will only be discussed in this paper to the extent that it pertains to the discussion of the augment. The main languages covered in our survey are Xhosa, Zulu, Swati and Southern Ndebele3. For Southern Ndebele and Xhosa, most of our data comes from recent fieldwork, whereas for Zulu and Swati, data is taken from published sources. The Xhosa data, including data from its varieties such as Bhaca, is taken from a corpus of recorded, transcribed and glossed discourse, collected in different parts of the Eastern Cape by the first author (Bloom Ström 2018). As there is very little morphosyntactic variation in the Eastern Cape – the existing variation is rather phonological and in the lexicon – examples from different parts of the province are used as instances of Xhosa in a wide sense (Bloom Ström 2018). The Nguni languages in general are for the most part mutually intelligible and rather form a dialect continuum. For this reason – although we name the varieties as separate entities – we consider the data in this paper in a micro-variation perspective without aiming at determining dialect borders and isoglosses. The data we rely on here for Southern Ndebele has been gathered in the Mpumalanga province by a team of researchers from the University of Helsinki and is published in Miestamo et al. (2019). Additional data for Southern Ndebele in the present paper (coded in the same way as the Xhosa examples, see footnote 6) is from the same fieldwork period, during which the two authors of this paper collaborated. The chapter is structured as follows. In section (2), we will first give a background to the different analyses offered in the literature with regards to the use of the augment in Nguni (2.1) and in Bantu languages more generally (2.2), and then discuss the theoretical preliminaries on which our proposal is based (2.3). In section (3) we present the results of our survey of the use of the augment and its relation to referentiality in Nguni languages.