At the beginning of this year (1973) members of the Department of African Languages at the University of Cape Town met in a daily seminar to discuss post-radical elements in predicatives [P] occurring in sentences [Ss] of the type:

Ss → [(S) + P]

where the subject [S] precedes a verbal predicate [Pv] … but not a copular predicate [Pc]. The topic of our discussions was in part the subject of Professor Whiteley's work on transitivity in Swahili, though we extended it to consider the relationship between the verbal extensions … which we will consider here … and certain syntactical preferences. In this work we were happily joined by Professor A. N. Tucker and it seemed to us that the subject of our labours was a fitting contribution to the memorial publication planned for Wilfred Whiteley by his colleagues at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London. Even though my colleagues did not have the pleasure of knowing Wilfred Whiteley they wished to be joined in this tribute to a fellow Bantuist.