Abstract
In Xhosa and other Southern Bantu languages, most lexical words such as verbs and nouns are preceded by bound prefixes with different meanings, including those expressing the time of the event or state. Going well beyond the typical function of the parts-of-speech ‘noun’ – indicating reference – the nouns in the following proposition carry all the morphology and there is no verbal element in the Xhosa example:1
1.
kwa-ku-ngu-mama o-wa-ye-na-mantombazana ama-bini
SM.PST.17-IPFV.17-COP.1-1a.mother RC.1-SM.PST.1-IPFV.1-AS.COP-6.girls AC.6-two
‘There was a mother with two daughters.’
Notably, there are copular elements in the proposition, but these are non-verbal and vary with the noun class of the predicate noun (numbers in the example refer to noun classes). This defining property of Xhosa, although noticed in the literature, has not yet been the topic of linguistic scrutiny.
In this presentation, preliminary results from a newly started project, which this PhD is a part of, will be discussed. These findings entail the structure and function of non-verbal copula forms in Xhosa, particularly those which are nominal predicates. The aim is to show what the restrictions are on nominal predicates, in terms of their combinatory possibilities with verbal morphology, their meaning, and in which kinds of constructions the verbal copula needs to occur. Xhosa is one of less than a handful of languages which stands out in the Bantu as well as Atlantic-Congo languages in having these non-verbal copulas. Therefore, a preliminary discussion on the position of Xhosa in typologies of non-verbal predication will be presented. This will entail, for example, comparing it to the “predicative inflection construction” as it is referred to in Bertinetto et al. (2019), where the non-verbal predicate exhibits verb-like behavior, taking similar inflection morphology to that of intransitive verbal predicates to varying degrees. See the example from Turkish in (2).
2.
Turkish (Kornfilt (1997: 57) as cited by Haspelmath (2025: 6))
Satıcı-y-dı-m.
seller-COP-PST-1SG
‘I was a seller.’
The formal properties of non-verbal predication will be discussed in this cross-linguistic perspective, adding to a renewed interest in such constructions as evidenced by recent publications (Haspelmath 2025, Bertinetto et al. 2026).