Verb Types and Light Verb Constructions

Once you have learned the different ways of conjugating verbs "imperfectively" (that is, "in the present"), you quickly realize that you need to learn a few bits of extra information with each verb so that you can use it properly.

Review of intransitive versus transitive

In Bambara, verbs are typically underlying intransitive, transitive or both.

Intransitive verbs are marked in citation form with the infinitive marker ka. For instance:

ka taa

"to go"

Transitive verbs are marked in citation form with infinitive marker ka plus the third person pronoun à, which acts as a placeholder for the direct object. For instance:

ka à fo → k'à fo

"to greet somebody"

Both kinds of verbs are "conjugated" in the same way. You simply add bɛ/tɛ as need be. For instance:

N bɛ taa

"I go"

Or:

N bɛ muso fo

"I greet the woman"

Verbs that are both

Some verbs can underlying be both intransitive or transitive (though the meaning may shift slightly). Linguists refer to such verbs as being ambitransitive.

For instance the verb don can be used both intransitively (e.g., ka don "to enter"):

N bɛ don so kɔnɔ

"I enter inside the house"

And transitively (e.g., k'à don "to put on sth; to wear sth")

Cɛ bɛ dulɔki don

"The man puts on the shirt"

While ambitransitive verbs like don are single entries in the dictionary, you might find it helpful to learn them as distinct items in a set of flashcards or list of vocabulary.

Here are some examples to further demonstrate such verbs.

• bɔ
  • ka bɔ = to go out; to exit
  • k'à bɔ = to take out; to remove sth
• boli
  • ka boli = to run; to flee
  • k'à boli = to ride sth; to drive sth
• wuli
  • ka wuli = to get up; to rise
  • k'à wuli = to boil (water)

Watching out for the passive voice

In Bambara, it is important to know whether a verb in underlyingly transitive, intransitive or both because of the way that the passive voice can be used in Bambara.

In English, when you drop a direct object, the sentence remains in the active voice.

I greet the woman

→

I greet

In Bambara, if you drop the direct object from a sentence with underlyingly transitive verb, the meaning of the sentence becomes passive!

For instance:

N bɛ muso fo
"I greet the woman" →

N bɛ fo
"I get greeted"

For this reason, it is very important to know whether a verb is underlyingly intransitive, transitive.

If you use a fundamentally transitive verb and drop its direct object, then your sentence becomes passive:

N bɛ loko dun
"I eat plantains" [ACTIVE]

→

N bɛ dun "I eat"
"I get eaten" [PASSIVE]

This example aside, in many cases, using the passive voice is very natural in Bambara. But it's a more advanced topic. Let's put it aside for now.

For beginners, what's more important is learning how to avoid a passive rendering so that you can simply take a transitive verb (e..g, k'à dun "to eat something") and say the equivalent of "I eat" instead of saying "I get eaten".

(NOTE: If the verb is ambitransitive [that is, both intransitive and transitive], then the passive interpretation is possible, but it is based on the context and the use of a subject for which it makes sense. For instance: N bɛ don "I enter" [ACTIVE from ka don "to enter"] vs Dulɔki bɛ don "A shirt gets put on" [PASSIVE from k'à don "to put on sth"].)

Light verb constructions with -li/ni

To use a transitive verb without specifying the direct object (e.g., saying "I eat" instead of "I eat rice") in Bambara, you will need to do a few things that will help avoid a passive rendering.

Specifically, you will transform the verb into a noun and then you will use the verb k'à kɛ (Lit. "to do sth") as a helper verb.

The most typical way to turn a verb into a noun is using the action suffix -li.

Like so:

k'à fo
"to greet somebody"

→

foli
"greeting" (as in, "an act of greeting")

When the verb ends in a nasal sound, then -li becomes -ni. For instance:

k'à sɛbɛn

"to write something"

→

sɛbɛnni

"writing" (as in, "an act or instance of writing")

Next, you take the helper verb (linguists often call it a "light verb") k'à kɛ and use it in place of the original verb.

N bɛ foli kɛ

Lit. "I do greeting" (as in, "I greet")

As you can see, we are literally saying "I do greeting". But the more appropriate translation into English would be "I greet" (as in, "I say hello"). For this reason, linguists consider this a "light verb construction". Because the main meaning of the sentence comes from the noun (foli "greeting") and not the verb (k'à kɛ).

Light verb constructions via conversion

Generally speaking, the action noun suffix -li/ni is productive. This means that it can be used with any verb to create a related action noun. And because it's predictable, you won't find a "-li/ni noun" for every single verb in the dictionary.

But that doesn't mean that it's commonly used for every verb.

In fact, for many verbs, it is not the preferred form.

Instead, for a range of verbs, it is more typical to proceed via conversion. This fancy linguistic word refers to cases where a word jumps from one part of speech category (e.g., "verb", "adverb", etc) into another (e.g. "adjective", "noun", etc) without any formal marking.

Let's take the verb k'à kalan ("to read/study something" [for simplicity's sake, I'll just translate it as "study" in the examples that follow]) for instance.

k'à kalan = to study

→

kalan = studying; studies

If this seems surprising to you, it's worth noting that this also occurs in English:

to talk (e.g., "I talk")

→

talk (e.g., "Talk is cheap")

Back to Bambara though! This process of unmarked verb-to-noun conversion can occur with many if not most verbs, but it is typically used in specific kinds of contexts.

For your purposes at this time, the most important kind of situation in which this occurs is when underlyingly transitive verbs are used in light verb constructions when you don't want to specify a direct object.

Let's take k'à kalan as an example of this usage.

Imagine that someone asks you what you do (e.g., I bɛ mun kɛ?). Instead of saying something like this:

N bɛ bamanankan kalan

"I study Bambara"

You can drop the direct object (i.e., bamanankan) and instead say this:

N bɛ kalan kɛ

"I do studies" (as in, "I study")

Note, it's technically possible to turn k'à kalan into a noun with -li/ni:

k'à kalan → kalanni 'act of studying'

This means that you could say N bɛ kalanni kɛ and it would be grammatically sound. But it would be quite marked and probably sound strange to most people.

This is the case for certain verbs. As such, it can helpful to learn them separately. Here's some of the major ones that are useful for beginners:

• k'à kalan → ka kalan kɛ = to study/read

• k'à dɔn → ka dɔn kɛ = to dance

  (NOTE: k'à dɔn is used to say things like "to dance the tango", "to dance the Lindy Hop" [that is, specific dances or steps that go with an instrument or song, etc])

• k'à sɛnɛ → ka sɛnɛ kɛ = to farm

• k'à baro → ka baro kɛ = to chat

  (NOTE: k'à baro means something like "to entertain someone by chatting with them")

• k'à feere → ka feere kɛ = to sell

• k'à baara → ka baara kɛ = to work

  (NOTE: k'à baara is used to say things like "to work the land" or "to work a piece of leather", etc. When used for people, it can mean "to bewitch somebody" or "to put a spell on somebody")

For other underlyingly transitive verbs, you can generally assume that using -li/ni will work in a light verb construction. For instance,

• k'à mɛn

  N tɛ mɛnni kɛ

  "I don't hear" (Lit. "I don't do hearing")

• k'à filɛ

  I tɛ filɛli kɛ?

  "You don't look?" (as in, "You don't look before crossing the street?")

• Etc.

Verbal Turns of Phrase

One last thing to look out for with verbs is what I'm going to call verbal turns of phrases. This is just a way to refer to way that in Bambara, you sometimes will use an expression with a verb in a way that appears to be uniquely descriptive compared to English.

For instance, there isn't a one-to-one verb that means the equivalent of "to sing". Instead you will use the expression ka dɔnkili da/la (Lit. "to lay.down a song"):

N bɛ dɔnkili da

"I sing"
Lit. "I lay.down a song"

(NOTE: The word dɔnkili itself actually means 'dance-call' [as in, "call to dance".)

Such turns of phrase aren't really anything special grammatically. They are just part of the way that Bambara expresses certain ideas in ways that are different from English.

But if you look up "sing" in the dictionary, you will need to understand how to build a sentence with the verbal expression ka dɔnkili da/la. And the same thing will apply when you learn or encounter other turns of phrase that do not translate directly with a single verb in English.

Summary

In this chapter, we covered the following:

• Verbs are typically underlying intransitive, transitive or both ("ambitransitive")
• Ambitransitive verbs can have slightly different meanings depending on how they are used (e.g., ka don "to enter" VS k'à don "to put on sth")
• If you drop the direct of object of transitive verb, your sentence becomes passive (e.g., N bɛ loko dun/dumu "I eat plantains" VS N bɛ dun/dumu/ "I get eaten")
• You can express the idea of a transitive verb without using a direct object via a light verb construction using the helper verb k'à kɛ (lit. "to do sth")
• In general, this can be done by turning a verb into a noun via the action noun suffix -li/ni (e.g., N bɛ dumuni kɛ Lit. "I do eating/food" –> "I eat")
• In some cases, you can convert a verb directly into a noun with no marking (e.g., k'à kalan 'to study sth' → kalan 'studies' ).
• Some verbs typically use their converted noun form when they figure in a light verb construction (e.g., N bɛ kalan kɛ "I do studies" → "I study")