Lutz Marten
List of John Benjamins publications in which Lutz Marten is involved.
2025 Morphosyntactic borrowing in closely related varieties: ‘False cognates’ in Swahili Historical Linguistics 2022: Selected papers from the 25th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Oxford, 1–5 August 2022, Kennard, Holly, Emily Lindsay-Smith, Aditi Lahiri and Martin Maiden (eds.), pp. 184–197 | Chapter
The paper examines contact-induced morphosyntactic change in Swahili, where material which had historically been lost is ‘reintroduced’ through contact with closely related languages which have retained the original feature. The paper discusses three examples of these morphosyntactic ‘false… read more
2024 Morphosyntactic retention and innovation in Sheng, a youth language or stylect of Kenya Studies in Language 48:4, pp. 909–950 | Article
This paper examines the morphosyntax of the East African Swahili-based urban youth language or stylect Sheng. Research on urban youth languages has often focused on these varieties as sites of rapid change and linguistic creativity. However, we show that many of the structural features which… read more
2014 A typology of Bantu subject inversion Linguistic Variation 14:2, pp. 318–368 | Article
This study charts variation in subject inversion constructions in Bantu languages. It distinguishes between seven types of inversion constructions: formal locative inversion, semantic locative inversion, instrument inversion, patient inversion, (clausal) complement inversion, default agreement… read more
2010 The great siSwati locative shift Continuity and Change in Grammar, Breitbarth, Anne, Christopher Lucas, Sheila Watts and David Willis (eds.), pp. 249–268 | Article
In siSwati the accumulation of a number of changes in the morphology and syntax of locative phrases has led to a more fundamental shift of restructuring of the underlying grammatical system – the great siSwati locative shift – so that locatives in siSwati are no longer, as in Proto-Bantu and most… read more
2008 Concepts of structural underspecification in Bantu and Romance The Bantu–Romance Connection: A comparative investigation of verbal agreement, DPs, and information structure, De Cat, Cécile and Katherine Demuth (eds.), pp. 3–39 | Article
The paper explores parallelisms between Bantu (specifically Otjiherero) and Romance (through Latin and Spanish) with respect to left and right peripheries, and subject and object clitics. The analysis is formulated in Dynamic Syntax (DS, Cann et al. 2005) and centrally involves notions of… read more