Revisiting Basaa verbal derivation

Abstract

Basaa, a Narrow Bantu language, A 43, spoken in Cameroon in Central Africa holds a serious record of descriptive works in phonology, morphology, and syntax. Verb morphology has been studied in detail by Bitja’a Kody (2000), Dimmendaal (1988), Hyman (2003) among others.  The present paper focusing on verb derivation raises two main issues: the paradigm of expansions that are recurrent in the language on the one hand, and extensions for which suggest the existence of additional suffixes to what is already reported on the other hand. Further extensions are the perfective, the associative, and the tentative.  This paper ends up with an attempt to reconstruct Basaa extensions, mirroring the Proto-Bantu propositions from Schadeberg (2003).