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CHAPTER 5 demonstratives, 19/ possessives, 20/ adjectives with stem-initial consonants 21/ and with stem—initia1 vowels, 22/ and the relative word - (par.47). 23/ Within the verb, agreement with nouns is required for subject prefixes (par. 28), 24/ object prefixes (par. 28), 25/ and relative prefixes (par. 28, 42). 26/ Present locative forms (par. 66), though they are related to the verb -— 'be,' have a different subject prefix for the singular of the MU~WA class.

27/ There are non-possessive personal pronouns for first, second and third person, singular and plural. These refer only to people, not to things.

28/ A simplified diagram of the verb phrase is in Figure 1.

The [ ] stands for the fact that the object prefix is often optional. The arrow stands for the fact that in any given verb phrase, both of the subject prefixes must be the same.

Figure l

29/ The principal tenses of Swahili are indicated by means of prefixes. Certain of these tenses are 'independent.' This means that if a verb is the only verb in a sentence, it must be in one of these tenses. Five independent tenses have prefixes that begin with a consonant. These are the E3

tense (present), the li_ tense (past), the t§_ tense (future),

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