Preposition à in Natioro: From comitatives to clausal conjunction

The paper deals with the syntax and semantics of the preposition à in Natioro, an underdescribed Gur language. This preposition is used as a comitative marker and expresses typical comitative meanings such as an instrument, companion, means of transportation etc. It can also conjoin NPs as well as finite clauses, with these two functions rarely combined in the languages of Sub-Saharan Africa. The aim of the paper is twofold. First, it describes the basic properties of comitative constructions and the positional restrictions imposed on comitative constructions of various semantic types. In particular, constructions with inanimate participants share some properties with clause-level adjuncts, and their position within the clause is fixed. In contrast, other comitative constructions have different syntactic properties and can be used in postposition to verbs as well as to nouns. This results in two possible configurations, namely the one where the comitative adjunct follows the noun it modifies, and the other where the comitative adjunct is inserted after the SOV or SVO sequence. It is also shown that all Natioro comitatives can be regarded as subordinate structures, and Natioro is a typical ‘with’-language where the comitative strategy is the basic medium used to express NP conjunction. Thus, both constituents expressing NP conjunction and comitative constructions expressing other meanings can be treated in a uniform way, although the semantic relations between the head nouns in such constructions and the comitative marked NPs may differ significantly. Second, the paper gives a typologically-based overview of the phenomenon and discusses the Natioro data in comparison with other languages of the African area. Namely, it establishes some parallels with the Mande languages where comitative constructions have similar syntactic properties.