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In the Sotho language, the deficient verbs are a special subset of Sesotho verbs that require a subordinate or complementary verb to complete their action, and which are used to form many tenses and to impart certain shades of meaning to the predicate. These verbs form part of ''multi-verbal conjugations'' comprising a string of verbs (each with its own subjectival concord) and verbal auxiliaries. Deficient verbs, being "deficient", are never used alone. Many of them are irregular in form and have irregular inflexions. Many of these verbs seem radical in nature, while others (especially those with complex implications) are obviously derived from certain extant normal verbs (but are used with slightly different meanings). What distinguishes the deficient usage of these normal verbs is the fact that they are followed by another verb and affect its meaning (and only the main verb may carry an objectival concord). ==Multi-verbal syntax== Deficient verbs are used to alter the meaning of complementary normal verbs, which have to follow the deficient verb(s) in word order. The following diagram represents the general shape of a typical multi-verbal conjugation ("In vain I edit them all"): (The bullets • are used here to join the parts of single words which would have been written separately in the current disjunctive orthography) Apart from the verbal complex, researchers of Bantu languages have noted that when the main verb is followed by its (first) direct object then this structure creates a "verb phrase" (or "prosodic phrase"), which may be treated as one phonological unit or domain by some grammatical processes.〔Actually, to be a bit more accurate, the verb must not be focused, otherwise the focused verb and the following object constitute two prosodic phrases. A phonological clue which shows this to be true is the fact that when a verb is focused it has overt penult stress, which is usually not present when a word is not phrase final (bold syllables are stressed): : ''re fothola dihola'' ('we uproot weeds' (not focused )) : ''re a di fothola dihola'' ('we do uproot the weeds indeed' (focused )) In the example above, the object and the verb were emphasised by using the objectival concord ''-di-'' in addition to the direct object, but one effect of this is that the verb becomes focused and (if it is in the present indicative tense) needs to be marked with the infix ''-a-'', thus creating two separate prosodic phrases. The same thing happens when the object appears before the verb in word order, and indeed it is precisely when the verb is marked for the object and focused that the language may assume any word order to emphasise certain parts of the sentence (not just SVO). In the main example ''ke tswatswa ke di hlophisa tsohle'' the main verb is not focused since, although it does have an objectival concord, it does not agree with its direct object (Sesotho is a pro-drop language; in the example both the verb and its direct object agree with the unspecified object rendered with the accusative pronoun "them" in the English translation).〕 For example, many languages with unbounded tonal shift or spread laws (unlike Sesotho's bounded spread — see Sesotho tonology) may often shift or spread a high tone underlying in the verbal complex all the way to the final, penult, or antepenultimate syllable of the following word, but only if that word is the verb's object. One Sesotho tonal law that's mildly sensitive to the verb phrase is the finality restriction (FR), which is not applied if the verb is immediately followed by the object. The structure created by deficient verbs followed by a normal verb is unique in a few ways: #Deficient verbs must have a complementary (main) verb, and this main verb must follow the deficient verbs, with no intervening words and no variation in word order. This is one of the very few instances in the Sesotho language when word order is absolutely immutable. If one wishes to emphasise the main verb's object then it needs to be placed before the very first deficient verb in the sequence, not just before the main verb. #There may be no pauses in speech between the deficient verbs and the main verb, contrary to how other words are treated. The entire sequence is pronounced as one whole unit, and may not be broken up.〔Some researchers treat the entire unit as one very long word with multiple morphemes and subjectival concords, especially since an inflected deficient verb can never stand alone. This would however violate some of the most basic properties of the Bantu verbal complex, such as the fact that an inflected verb must have one and only one subjectival concord. It is clear that deficient stems are like normal verb stems in that by assuming certain affixes in a certain order they create complete words, even if those words may not stand independently. Synchronically and diachronically, there are numerous instances of sequences of verbs contracting to form structures where some of the verbs are no longer independent words, but this is, without exception, always accompanied by one or more of the verbs losing their subjectival concords.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Sotho deficient verbs」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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