Lengson Ngwasi
Doctoral Student
Department of Languages &About Lengson Ngwasi
Background
I obtained my M.A. (Linguistics) and B.A. with Education at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM), Tanzania. I also worked as a Tutorial Assistant and Assistant Lecturer at the Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics (FLL) at the same University from 2013-2017.
PhD Project
My PhD project investigates the way the concept of reflexivity and reciprocity are expressed in four Bantu languages, spoken in Tanzania, which are: Sukuma, Sumbwa, Nyaturu, and Nilamba.
Specifically, the project investigates the way reciprocal markers tend to develop historically into reciprocal markers, and probably to other related meanings such as middle voice. This aspect is interesting because scholars of Bantu languages have claimed that the reflexive and reciprocal meanings are encoded by different morpho-syntactic markers, which also take different morphological positions in the verb template (Schadeberg, 2003). But recently, studies on some Bantu languages show that the case is no longer the same as reflexive markers encode also reciprocal meaning (Ngwasi, 2016; Petzell, 2008; Bostoen, 2010 etc.).
The study is guided by The Overlap Model and Grammaticalization chain involving reflexive-reciprocal polysemies in African languages by Heine (1993) and Heine (2000) respectively.
Publications
Ngwasi, L. (2016). Reflexive marking in Kihehe. Unpublished MA dissertation. University of Dar es Salaam.