The subject marker in Bantu as an antifocus marker*

Abstract

In most Bantu languages, subject-verb agreement is expressed by prefixing a subject marker (SM) to the verb stem; the SM agrees with the noun class features of the preverbal subject. In this paper I suggest that a preverbal subject DP and the corresponding SM start out as one constituent in the derivation. I argue that the class 5 subject noun phrase ikati ("cat") and the class 5 SM li-, which is prefixed to the verb in (1), are initially part of the same phrase.