Focus and Entailment

In an earlier study ¹ certain problems of transitivity were discussed with reference to a group of speakers for whom Swahili is a first language. I (W.H.W.) tried to show there that future lexicographers of Swahili might gain important insights into the syntactic properties of verbs by looking at the various transitivity patterns with which they are associated. I started out from the fact that in Swahili there are a number of sentences of a pattern S(ubject) V(erb) O(bject) from which other sentences may be differentially ‘entailed’ by transposing the lexical items which are in subject and object relationship to the verb. This procedure yielded the following patterns:

Po	mzee yule alikufa njaa, That old chap died of hunger.
	No entailment (E-).
Pi	mtoto huyu anapenda ndizi, This child likes bananas. Ei ndizi zinapendwa na mtoto huyu
Pii	huyu atafaa kazi, He’ll do for the job. Eii kazi itamfaa huyu
Piii	mto umejaa maji, The river is full of water. Eiii maji yamejaa mtoni
Piv	mgeni wetu amefika nyumbani, Our guest has arrived (at) home. Eiv nyumbani þamefika mgeni wetu

P/E sentences can in all cases be inferred from one another, but, as will be shown in the following pages, the precise semantic relationship between them is not, in all cases, either constant or straightforward. Particular P/E patterns were found to be characteristic of different verbs and a systematic study of simple radicals in the language suggested a tentative but extremely interesting basis for verbal classification.