Predicate Partition For Predicate-Centred Focus And Meeussen's Proto-Bantu "Advance Verb Construction"

Meeussen’s (1967: 121) extensive grammatical reconstructions for Proto-Bantu contain a so-called “advance verb construction” that is comprised of an infinitive followed by a finite form of the same verb (typologically commonly called “cognate”verb) and conveys a marked type of information structure (IS) in which a predicate component is highlighted pragmatically. While Güldemann (2003: 335–337) already characterised this construction to pertain to the IS subdomain of so-called “predicate-centred focus”, he had to leave open some important structural and functional details. Since then, much more relevant data have become available, both inside and outside of Bantu. In this chapter, we attempt to specify Meeussen’s (1967) proposal about his “advance verb construction” and its “relatives” by providing a cross-linguistic perspective of the relevant domain, presenting and analysing a wide range of relevant structures from across the Bantu family, and finally discussing the results of this comparative family survey regarding both the synchronic variation and the diachronic dynamics of change.