I doing was fieldwork: Focus and V-Aux order in Ékègùsìí

Out of some 300+ Bantu languages (Nurse & Philippson, 2003:2-3), 6 have been shown to display S V-Aux O (i.e. Subject Verb Auxiliary Object) word order in declarative sentences (Gibson, 2016; Nurse & Philippson, ibid:9), as opposed to the typologically expected S Aux-V O order (Nurse, 2003; Dryer, 2007:90). Using data drawn from my own fieldwork on Ékègùsìí (Bantu JE42, Kenya), this talk will (i) exemplify this unusual word order, (ii) discuss typological work within and beyond Bantu which both shows its rarity and also suggests some reasons why this might be the case, and (iii) run through some analyses to account for it, drawing upon the synchronic status of Ékègùsìí morphosyntactic focus marking and its interaction with word order changes.