Talk by Aron Finholt, sponsored by Western Washington University's Department of Linguistics, April 28, 2022

To describe a property of a noun or relate two nouns to one another, many Indo-European languages (including English) use a be-verb. In English, be is used to attribute properties to a subject, e.g. John is tall, to specify a member of a set/group, e.g. the teacher is Mary, and even to equate two different nouns, e.g. Peter Parker is Spiderman. While English uses the same strategy – namely, the use of be – to express these different relations, other languages show much more variation. In this talk, Aron Finholt shows that certain Bantu languages of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda treat sentences like John is tall differently than “specificational” sentences like the teacher is Mary. Finholt concludes with some discussion of related issues and further comment on the importance of a non-Eurocentric view of linguistic variation.

Aron Finholt, a recent WWU Linguistics graduate (’19), is a third year Ph.D. student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Kansas. His research utilizes a combination of fieldwork and experimental methods to investigate the interfaces between syntax, semantics, and morphology, focusing primarily on understudied Bantu languages spoken in Central/East Africa. As part of a collaborative documentary project, Finholt is currently conducting fieldwork on five different Bantu languages spoken in and around Kansas City KS/MO (e.g. Mashi, Kihavu, Kinyamulenge, Kinyabwisha, Kifuliiru). Some of his recent topics of interest include copular predication, possessive have-verbs, the semantic contribution of complementizers, and verbal tonology. Finholt is also a Kiswahili Language (FLAS) Fellow at the Kansas African Studies Center.

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