Beyond word order: Rangi in comparative perspective

Rangi has come to the attention of linguists due to a number of features which are unusual

from a comparative perspective, a typological perspective, or both. Features which have

received in-depth examination to date include the verb-auxiliary word order (Mous 2000,

Stegen 2002, Dunham 2005, Gibson 2019) and negation (Gibson and Wilhelmsen 2015). A

number of other features have also been identified, i.e. the presence of deictic particles and

the inclusive/exclusive distinction (Gibson and Marten 2019). The present talk combines the

in-depth examination of a number of these features, with a broader comparative approach

made possible by the Bantu Morphosyntactic Variation (BMV) database. The BMV (Marten

et al. 2018) contains data points relating to 142 surface-level parameters of morphosyntax

for over 100 languages, with 80%+ coverage for approximately 40 languages. Using this as a

comparative tool, the talk examines the ‘position’ of Rangi within a broader comparative

perspective and seeks to gain a better understanding of the markedness of these features

and the language more broadly.