Morphosyntax of the Verb in Lingala: A Generative Approach

In this paper I have analysed the internal structure of the verb in Lingala which is a Bantu Language spoken in both Congo and Angola. Being an agglutinative language, Lingala verb unit is a concatenation of many elements glued to the verb root, including subject, tense and aspect, polarity, etc. As a contribution to morphological valence changing, I have developed the N-Tier Structure (NTS) theory. It is an "all-in-one" tree structure with distinct layers displaying syntactic, morphological, lexical and sometimes phonological information of sentences before and after the valence alteration.