Swahili coordinated infinitives and non-canonical case-marking

Abstract

Abstract Swahili exhibits a construction where a tensed and an infinitival clause are coordinated. This is an example of “unbalanced” coordination insofar as one verb is tensed and the other is not. Furthermore, the licensing of an overt subject in the infinitival clause problematizes Case Theory because infinitival clauses do not assign nominative case. The construction is also puzzling because although it bears some characteristics of pseudo-coordination it also has properties reminiscent of true coordination. Despite the theoretical questions this raises, the construction has not been adequately addressed in the literature: to our knowledge, this paper presents the first-ever theoretical analysis of this construction. We argue that the conjuncts are at least coordinated AgrSPs (the subject agreement phrase) dominated by TP (the tense phrase) which licenses case-marked subjects in both conjuncts.