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About Augustino Amos Kagwema

I am a doctoral student in African languages. My PhD project focuses on verbal morphology in three Bantu languages spoken in western Tanzania (Sukuma, Nyamwezi and Kimbu). I am also interested in language documentation and description of underdescribed languages. My supervisors for this project are: Malin Petzell (University 91̽»¨) and Hannah Gibson (University of Essex). I expect to finish this project in the Spring term 2027. I also teach Swahili courses at the department.

Introducing my research project

The topic of this study is illustrated in (1) below with the English examples. (1a) involves a transitive-causative construction with two arguments, an agent ‘Mary’ and a theme ‘door’. (1b) involves an intransitive-anticausative construction with only one argument, the theme ‘door’. Syntactically, the agent argument is realized as a subject and the theme as an object in (1a) whereas in (1b) the theme is promoted to the subject position and the agent is deleted. Specifically, the topic focuses on constructions like (1b).

(1)a. Mary opened the door.

b. The door opened.

The goal of this project is to investigate anticausativization in three F20 Bantu languages. Specifically, the study has three objectives. In the English example (1) above the verb in transitive, causative (1a) and that of the intransitive, anticausative in (1b) share the same morphological form. However, languages differ in the strategies they use to encode anticasusatives. Therefore, the first objective revolves around this cross-linguistic fact i.e., to explore strategies used to encode anticausativization in Sukuma, Nyamwezi and Kimbu. The second specific objective is to examine the syntactic properties of each strategy used to encode anticausatives. It has been shown in the literature that marked and unmarked anticausatives differ syntactically. These findings motivated the present study to investigate the situation in Bantu languages, particularly Sukuma, Nyamwezi and Kimbu to see if the strategies used to encode anticausative differ syntactically. The last objective of this study is to examine semantic restrictions for each strategy of anticausativization. The aim is to establish semantic restrictions that make certain verbs take the strategy they take in encoding anticausativization and to establish possible meaning differences.