Vol. 35 No. 1 (2026): NJAS Special Issue: Auxiliary Verb Constructions in Bantu Languages
Special Issue: Auxiliary Verb Constructions in Bantu

On the Morphology, Interpretation, and Development of the Kagulu Auxiliary ng’hali

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Leora Bar-el
University of Montana
Bio
Ponsiano Kanijo
Mkwawa University College of Education
Bio
Malin Petzell
University of Gothenburg
Bio

Published 2026-03-31

Keywords

  • auxiliary verbs,
  • Kagulu (Greater East Ruvu languages),
  • grammaticalization,
  • tense and aspect,
  • phasal polarity

Copyright (c) 2026 Leora Bar-el, Ponsiano Kanijo, Malin Petzell

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

On the Morphology, Interpretation, and Development of the Kagulu Auxiliary ng’hali. (2026). Nordic Journal of African Studies, 35(1), 75–100. https://doi.org/10.53228/yye3er47

Abstract

The Kagulu auxiliary verb ng’hali appears in a variety of auxiliary verb constructions and has several phonological realizations (ng’hali, kali, and ng’hati). Unlike other auxiliary verbs in the language, ng’hali occurs with limited morphology and is not used as a main verb. As in many Bantu languages, ng’hali has phasal polarity properties (see van Baar 1997; Kramer 2021): it yields ‘still’ and ‘not yet’ interpretations. The goal of this paper is to describe the morphophonological, morphosyntactic, and morphosemantic properties of ng’hali. We explore the development of ng’hali into an aspect marker and its co-occurrence with more complex auxiliary verb constructions consisting of other Kagulu verbs, namely the auxiliary uwa ‘be’ and gendelela ‘continue’. In addition to being the first detailed description of these underdocumented properties of ng’hali, this study contributes to our understanding of the role that auxiliaries play in languages with reduced tense/aspect morphology, as well as the grammaticalization paths of auxiliaries in Bantu languages.

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