PASSIVE IN SOUTHERN NILOTIC

Languages that have the passive have different ways of expressing it, either by relegating the subject to the peripheral position, or by omitting it all together syntactically. Some studies have also shown that the passive originates from the reanalysis of third person impersonal constructions. Nilotic languages are some of those that are thought to have no passive at all. This paper sought to examine the passive in the Southern Nilotic languages with a view to finding out if they had passive constructions or not and, in case they did, to establishing whether their passive structure had any relationship with the third person plural impersonal constructions and the first person plural construction and whether the subject in such a passive structure underwent any reanalysis from the direct object status to subject status or not. The data was taken from the Tugen, Keiyo, Kipsigis and Nandi dialects of Kalenjin, one of the Southern Nilotic languages.