Revisiting Basaa verbal derivation

Abstract

Basaa, a Narrow Bantu language (A43) spoken in Cameroon in Central Africa holds a serious record of descriptive works in phonology, morphology, and syntax. Verb morphology has been studied in detail by Bitjaa Kody (1990), Dimmendaal (1988), and Hyman (2003), among others. The present paper focuses on verb derivation in Baasa, and raises two main issues: (i) the paradigm of expansions that are recurrent in the language, and (ii) extensions which suggest the existence of additional suffixes to what is already reported. Further extensions include the perfective, the associative, and the tentive. This paper concludes with an attempt to reconstruct Basaa extensions, mirroring Schadeberg’s (2003) Proto-Bantu propositions.

Keywords

• basaa
• morphological expansion
• perfective
• associative
• tentive