ABSTRACT
Referent tracking concerns the retrieval of familiar referents in discourse. It correlates with definiteness, a phenomenon characterized by familiarity and unique identifiability, and is marked by articles in languages such as English. Bantu languages are articleless and, therefore, normally exhibit bare nouns. This is the case with Northern Sotho (S32), a Bantu language spoken in the northern parts of South Africa. The aim of this chapter is to explore mechanisms of referent tracking in the language. Examination of data shows that the noun class system is central to the phenomenon, extending influence through agreement. Anaphoric reference and full lexical NP mentions have shown to be enabling mechanisms for referent tracking. Devices identified for anaphoric reference are agreement markers and the absolute pronoun in pronominal roles. Full NP repetition occurs unmodified, for contrastive disambiguation, or includes determiners—the demonstrative, associative constructions, and quantifiers, which by their inherent definite character recover intended familiar referents.
