Tmesis in Ebang (Heiban, Kordofanian)

Abstract

This paper describes an intricate pattern of subject placement in Ebang, a Kordofanian language spoken in the Nuba Mountains (Sudan). In this construction, a lexical subject appears within a complex verb form. The lexical subject may consist of a bare noun or a whole noun phrase. The insertion point is immediately before the verb stem but after all inflectional morphology. The initial part of the discontinuous verb form is shown to be not a word but a bound form, suggesting that the notions of morphological word and syntactic atom need not coincide.