The Verb-group in Kimwimbi, Kenya

This study is an investigation of the competence underlying the ordering of the information in the verb group by Kimwimbi L1 speakers. Kimwimbi is a dialect of Kimeru, a Bantu language spoken in the eastern parts of Kenya. A set of rules have been developed and discussed, which are intended to account for the competence displayed by the members of the speech community in judging the appropriateness of particular verb-groups out of any actual speech context, and in actual speech behavior. These have been based on syntactic constructions like negations, interrogatives, imparatives, among others. The tenets of universal grammar have been tested in tracing evidence of transformational movements in the language. This has been done using active and passive constructions, interrogatives and relative clauses.