Imbrication is a phenomenon occurring in many

Bantu languages The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu people of Central, Southern, Eastern africa and Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages. The t ...

in which morphemes interweave in certain

morphophonological Morphophonology (also morphophonemics or morphonology) is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphology (linguistics), morphological and phonology, phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound chan ...

conditions. For example, consider the Setswana verb stem ''-rek-a'' ("buy"). The passive voice is formed by adding the extension ''-w-'' to produce ''-rek-w-a''. The

perfect Perfect commonly refers to: * Perfection, completeness, excellence * Perfect (grammar), a grammatical category in some languages Perfect may also refer to: Film * Perfect (1985 film), ''Perfect'' (1985 film), a romantic drama * Perfect (2018 f ...

is formed by adding the morpheme ''-ile'' to produce ''-rek-ile''. But when these are combined to produce the perfect form of the passive voice, the verb becomes ''-rek-il-w-e'', with the perfect morpheme split into two pieces, rather than the expected *''-rek-w-ile''. Hyman, using the Cibemba language as an example, proposes four main factors that determine the occurrence of imbrication: * the size of the verb base * the nature of the final C of the verb base * the nature of the V preceding the final C of the verb base * the identity of the last morpheme of the verb base

References

{{ling-morph-stub Bantu languages Morphophonology