The morphosyntax of the locative in Jahunda

This article discusses the morphosyntax of locative nouns in Jahunda, a dialect of Kalanga spoken in Zimbabwe. The morphosyntax of locatives has been studied across Bantu languages, looking at the occurrence of historical locative prefixes *pa-, *ku- and *mu-, the modification of the locative in a locative determiner phrase, agreement within the locative determiner phrase, locativepredicate agreement and inversion. No studies have been done on the morphosyntax of locatives in Jahunda. This article aims to analyse the strategies of forming locatives in Jahunda, the structure of the locative determiner phrase and locative subject-predicate agreement. The study adopts a qualitative research methodology and data were collected through focus group discussions and interviews. In the study, we established that there are two ways of forming locatives in Jahunda. First, locatives are derived by prefixing locative prefixes pa-, ku- and mu- to noun stems, nouns, demonstrative pronouns, absolute pronouns and relative clauses. Second, locatives are derived by preposing the locative kuna to class 1a/2a determiner phrases. We argue that subject locatives merge at spec vP/PrP and move to spec T to control subject agreement.