•Plural verbs occur throughout most of Africa and have certainly been
recorded in Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic
and Nilo-Saharan language phyla
•Nonetheless, their distribution is very patchy which may be related to
broadly to the incidence of verb morphology; where verbs have
derivational morphology, plural verbs can occur.
•Branches of phyla which have lost morphology, such as West Benue-Congo,
can only develop plural verbs through suppletion, which does
occur, but is very rare
•This talk will cover languages where verbal plurals have been lexicalised;
languages with productive extensions marking frequentative
or iterative, such as Bantu are not considered
•As a consequence most attention is give to morphology but examples of
syntax are found in the source papers
•