│ │ root │ obj.│ │ └─────────┘ │ │ macro-stem │ └───────────────────┘ verb phrase (The bullets • are used here to join the parts of single words which would have been written separately in the current disjunctive orthography) Apart from the verbal complex, researchers of Bantu languages have noted that when the main verb is followed by its (first) direct object then this structure creates a "verb phrase" (or "prosodic phrase"), which may be treated as one phonological unit or domain by some grammatical processes.
[1] For example, many languages with unbounded tonal shift or spread laws (unlike Sesotho's bounded spread — see Sesotho tonology) may often shift or spread a high tone underlying in the verbal complex all the way to the final, penult, or antepenultimate syllable of the following word, but only if that word is the verb's object.
Within the groups, the verbs tend to have similar forms, but often vastly differing conjugation possibilities and behaviours.
The Group I verb appears first, with -ile following pronounced with participial sub-mood tones.
As with the simple infix, the first person singular subjectival concord ke- becomes a syllabic /ŋ̩/ (written ⟨n⟩ and attached to the following k) by dissimilation.
The morpheme -tla is only found in the positive present potential (it has no negative) with a meaning of "lest" or "or else", used in a type of consecutive construction.
Examples: A phonological clue which shows this to be true is the fact that when a verb is focused it has overt penult stress, which is usually not present when a word is not phrase final (bold syllables are stressed): In the example above, the object and the verb were emphasised by using the objectival concord -di- in addition to the direct object, but one effect of this is that the verb becomes focused and (if it is in the present indicative tense) needs to be marked with the infix -a-, thus creating two separate prosodic phrases.
The same thing happens when the object appears before the verb in word order, and indeed it is precisely when the verb is marked for the object and focused that the language may assume any word order to emphasise certain parts of the sentence (not just SVO).
In the main example [kʼɪt͡sʼʷɑt͡sʼʷɑkʼiˌdiɬopʰisɑt͡sʼoɬɛ] ke tswatswa ke di hlophisa tsohle the main verb is not focused since, although it does have an objectival concord, it does not agree with its direct object (Sesotho is a pro-drop language; in the example both the verb and its direct object agree with the unspecified object rendered with the accusative pronoun "them" in the English translation).
Their final vowels change to [e] instead of [ɑ] in the future tenses, and to [e] instead of [ɛ] in the subjunctive.