Introduction to the Special Issue

Bantu languages are notoriously “verby” (Nurse 2008, 21), referring to the highly agglutinative nature of the inflected verb, whose complexities have sparked extensive research. Now that Bantu verbal morphology is much better understood, the time has come to widen the scope of research beyond the limits of the inflected, lexical verb to auxiliary verbs, which play an important role in Bantu verbal constructions but have enjoyed relatively little dedicated attention. This special issue is the outcome of an open call for papers issued by editors of the Nordic Journal of African Studies, inviting contributions on auxiliary verb constructions in Bantu languages. The call was designed to capture the breadth and diversity of current research on Bantu auxiliaries, encouraging submissions that address their categorical status, functional range, diachronic development, contact-induced change, and interaction with broader grammatical systems.