Adjunction in Mbere Verb Phrase

Abstract

This paper examines the syntactic distribution of verb adjuncts in Mbere, a Bantu language spoken in Congo-Brazzaville. It aims to identify the categories that function as verb adjuncts in Mbere and to determine whether their movement within the sentence obeys a universal principle of free recursiveness or is instead constrained by parametric variation. Data were collected through participant and non-participant observation, interviews, and introspection, and the analysis is conducted within Chomsky’s Minimalist Program (MP). The results show that adjuncts in Mbere are realized as adverbial phrases (AdvPs) and prepositional phrases (PPs). When the adjunct merges as an adverb, its distribution depends on the type of adjunct. If it is a temporal adverb, the distribution is free (final, middle, and initial positions). However, if it belongs to another category of adverb, the only attested position is final. If the adjunct occurs as a prepositional phrase, it can merge either in final or initial position, but not in the middle. These findings indicate that the recursiveness of adjuncts is not a universal property but rather a parametric one: in some languages their distribution is free, while in others, such as Mbere, their distribution is subject to specific distributional constraints.