On June 9th, I’ll be presenting a paper co-authored with Remah Lubambo, Msuswa Petrus Mabena, Cordelia Nkwinika & Muhle Sibisi at the Bantu 9 conference, which is being held at Malawi University of Science and Technology this year. Very, very sadly, I am not able to attend the conference in person, but the conference has been running great in hybrid form. I am very glad that I get to be part of it even though I couldn’t make the trip — even though I feel a little heart prick every time I see an old friend or colleague sitting in one of the conference rooms while I watch via Zoom.
Our presentation is called “Expressions of modal possibility in South African Nguni and Tsonga Languages”, and it compares the contexts in which several modal verbs and prefixes can and cannot be used in isiZulu, isiNdebele, isiXhosa, Siswati, and Xitsonga, respectively. We had a lot of fun developing the presentation, and we uncovered some interesting (apparent) crosslinguistic differences that beg for deeper investigation.