ABSTRACT
Applicative structures in Bantu have received an enormous amount of attention in the generative syntactic literature, going back to the early days of ‘principles and parameters’ thinking. The core of the great interest in these constructions is that although applicatives share a common function – that of adding an extra object to the argument structure of the verb – their syntactic and semantic properties vary substantially. 2 What looks (morphologically) like similar applicative structures may therefore have different syntactic properties across different Bantu languages; furthermore, different semantically defined sorts of applicative structures may have different syntactic properties within the same language. Sometimes these differences are reflected morphologically, but often they are not.
