TITLE:
Locative Marking in Ibinda, Portuguese, and English: A Contrastive Analysis
AUTHORS:
Nestor Zau Bachi
KEYWORDS:
Locative Marking, Contrastive Linguistics, Ibinda, Portuguese, English, Bantu Languages, Language Contact
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics,
Vol.16 No.5,
October
27,
2026
ABSTRACT: Locative marking is one of the major grammatical mechanisms by which languages express spatial relations. Concepts such as location, direction, movement, and source/destination/containment are common across languages, but the ways in which these meanings are expressed differ dramatically across language families. The analysis is contrastive in nature and is a qualitative, literature-based study of locative marking in Ibinda, Portuguese, and English (also drawing on internationally recognised theoretical perspectives), while also utilising descriptive and lexicographically oriented scholarship produced in Cabinda, Angola. The analysis relies largely on the grammatical sketch of Ibinda by Chicuna (2015), the lexicographical research gathered by Mazunga (2015), as well as established works in Contrastive Linguistics, Bantu linguistics, Cognitive Semantics, linguistic typology, and language contact. Literature was identified using systematic searches of academic databases, privileging peer-reviewed grammars, monographs, and locally produced linguistic documentation. These results show that the locative marking in Ibinda is grammatically organized differently than Portuguese and English at a fundamental level. While the Portuguese and English languages largely rely on independent prepositions to encode spatial relations, Ibinda can use a more comprehensive morphosyntactic system that uses nominal morphology in combination with other forms of noun classes, nominal prefixes, and even agreement structures. This comparison also illustrates that identical spatial concepts can be expressed in very different grammatical architectures, supporting functional rather than lexical approaches to cross-linguistic comparison. Cabinda’s multilingual linguistic ecology provides a theoretically plausible source of contact data from which to derive evidence for grammatical interaction across languages. With regard to contact-induced grammatical change, no direct evidence is established in the available literature; however, much indirect evidence is provided that language contact can be used as a potential explanatory framework for variation in the structural properties of languages spoken side by side. Therefore, this study also adds to the international documentation of Ibinda by showing that locally produced descriptive and lexicographical work can be scientifically relevant in more general considerations of Contrastive Linguistics, Bantu Linguistics, and Language Contact, respectively. It is important to note that specific documentation of languages is crucial for facilitating cross-linguistic research—and this is doubly true when it comes to understudied African languages in general.