LingLunch: Johannes Mursell & Katharina Hartmann (Goethe University Frankfurt-am-Main)

Johannes Mursell & Katharina Hartmann (Goethe University Frankfurt-am-Main): Negation in Shupamem

In this talk we discuss the behavior of negation in Shupamem, a Grassfields Bantu language spoken in Cameroon. We argue that negation in Shupamem involves a negative chain headed by a neg-operator, which interacts with other A’-dependencies in the language, particularly with subject topic movement. This interaction leads to the occurrence of an additional post-verbal pronoun that takes up the phi-features of the subject, saving the derivation from crashing. In the final part of the presentation, we show that negation interacts in similar ways with the A'-systems of other African languages. We present evidence for this claim from Dagbani (Mabia, Northern Ghana), Hausa (Chadic, Northern Nigeria), and Gweno (Bantu, Tanzania).