This paper investigates a morpheme central to the clausal syntax of Kîîtharaka (SVO, Bantu,
E54, Kenyan). The first sections of the paper offer a careful description of three functions of
this morpheme, which marks information structure and cyclic movement. We show that the
syntactic and semantic properties of the three functions fall into a neat hierarchy. Rather than
treating the different uses of the morpheme as distinct, accidentally homophonous items, we
suggest an account that needs to postulate only one morpheme, allowing it to realize …