Luvale (Niger-Congo, Bantoid)

Horton (1949: 111ff.) describes various verbs as defective or deficient, though for most of them what is meant is that they are used as auxiliaries (in so-called 'compound constructions'). Besides these, there are two verbs which might be thought of as defective, which seem to be restricted to certain tenses:

• -kweci 'possess, own' only occurs in the present tense form (which itself is largely obsolete):

ami	ngu-kweci	kawa
I	1SG.PRS-own	dog
'I own a dog.'

• -uci 'not to be, missing' occurs only with past tense subject prefixes.

To put this into context, the synthetic tenses are:

PRS	PRS SBJ prefix		+ stem		largely obsolete
PRF	PRS SBJ prefix	+ na	+ stem	(+ V alternation)
FUT	PRS SBJ prefix	+ mu/na	+ stem
PERM	PST SBJ prefix		+ stem
IMM PST	PST SBJ prefix		+ stem	+ nga
REM PST	PST SBJ prefix		+ stem	+ ile

However, it is unclear if these morphological restrictions actually translate into functional restrictions.

References

Horton, A. E. 1949. A grammar of Luvale. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.