This study examines some lexical and morphosyntactic variation found among the Swahili varieties in Zanzibar, Tanzania. It has been reported that there are three varieties in the island, and the new data collected in the villages inside the island suggest that there is a need for closer investigation and finer categorization of the Zanzibar varieties. Furthermore, there has been little discussion about the relationship between the Standard variety and other varieties or variation in the use of these varieties. In this paper, we report on the use of these Zanzibar varieties, namely, the town variety, Kiunguja-Mjini, the Northern varieties Kichaani, Kikibeni, Kitumbatu-Gomani, Kinungwi and Kimatemwe, and the Southern varieties Kijambiani, Kipaje and Kimakunduchi at the level of the lexicon. In addition, we examine the varieties of the Northern province – Kichaani, Kikibeni, Kitumbatu-Gomani, Kinungwi, and those of the Southern province – Kijambiani, Kipaje at the level of the grammar. In this paper, we concentrate on tense/aspect, the copula sentence, relative clause, and imperative. Among the data on these languages, we investigate, in particular, the variation among these varieties on the one hand, and the variation between these varieties and Standard Swahili on the other.

This paper deals with structural variation in Sheng at the syntactic level by focusing on its relative constructions. Although numeral linguistic studies of Sheng have been published since the beginning of this century (Githiora 2002, Mbaabu & Nzuka 2003, Ferrari 2004, Ogechi 2005, Bosire 2006, 2008, Shinagawa 2006, 2007, Beck 2015, among others), their grammatical descriptions tend to be rather limited to the domain of morphology and the syntactic uniqueness of Sheng has scarcely been brought within the scope of precise linguistic analysis. This paper thus aims to describe the syntactic variation, or structural fluidity, found in relative constructions in Sheng and clarify the syntactic distribution of multiple relativizers. Based on these facts and analyses, the developmental process of the -enye construction, which is widely used in other Swahili contact varieties as well, will be further investigated especially from the perspectives of intra-Bantu language contact and cross- Bantu typology.

This thesis describes and analyses patterns of complementation and auxiliation in the languages spoken in an understudied area of Italy, namely Southern Lazio. From a descriptive perspective, this thesis serves to document several severely endangered Romance languages spoken in the Italian peninsula. In so doing, several previously undocumented complementizer and auxiliary systems are illustrated for the first time. From a theoretical perspective, this thesis accounts for the patterns of variation found in these auxiliary and complementizer systems. Traditional descriptions of Italo- Romance treat these systems as entirely unrelated. Indeed, to date, no previous study has compared the distribution of complementizers and auxiliaries in Italo-Romance to investigate similarities and correspondences between them. This dissertation takes the original step of demonstrating that the distribution of particular auxiliary systems correlates with the distribution of particular complementizer systems, offering, in turn, an integrated and complementary theoretical analysis of both phenomena.

There is a high degree of morphosyntactic microvariation with respect to the number and position of object markers found across Bantu languages. This paper examines variation in object marking in Swahili, against the backdrop of variation in object marking in Bantu more broadly. Verb forms in Standard Swahili are well-known to typically only permit one pre-stem object marker. However, here we show that there are isolated cases of post-verbal marking of objects from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective. The paper focuses on two case studies. Firstly, ‘Old Swahili’ – that is, the language of classical Swahili poetry – where examples of typologically unusual emphatic object marker doubling are found. Secondly, we show that post-verbal object marking is in fact also found in Standard (Modern) Swahili, namely in second person plural marking, in post-verbal locative markers and with non-verbal predication. However, we also show that the relationship between these forms, the Old Swahili paradigm of object marker doubling, and post-verbal object marking in Bantu more widely – in particular post-verbal plural addressee marking – is complex.