James Essegbey | University of Florida (original) (raw)
Papers by James Essegbey
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Tutrugbu (Nyangbo) Language and Culture, 2019
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Tutrugbu (Nyangbo) Language and Culture, 2019
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Tutrugbu (Nyangbo) Language and Culture, 2019
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The papers in this volume were presented at the 50th Annual Conference on African Linguistics hel... more The papers in this volume were presented at the 50th Annual Conference on African Linguistics held at the University of British Columbia in 2019. The contributions span a range of theoretical topics as well as topics in descriptive and applied linguistics. The papers reflect the typological and genetic diversity of languages in Africa and also represent the breadth of the ACAL community, with papers from both students and more senior scholars, based in North America and beyond. They thus provide a snapshot on current research in African linguistics, from multiple perspectives. To mark the 50th anniversary of the conference, the volume editors reminisce, in the introductory chapter, about their memorable ACALs.
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This is the introduction to the volume Celebrating 50 years of ACAL.
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Dingemanse (2011: 133), describing the ideophone in Siwu (a Ghana-Togo Mountain language spoken i... more Dingemanse (2011: 133), describing the ideophone in Siwu (a Ghana-Togo Mountain language spoken in the Volta Region of Ghana), echoes their peculiarity thus: “its properties include deviant phonotactics, special word structures, expressive morphology, syntactic aloofness, foregrounded prosody, sensory semantics and a depictive mode of signification.” Peculiarity features prominently in his proposed definition (emphasis mine): “ideophones are marked words that depict sensory images” (Dingemanse 2011: 25). This definition, in addition to highlighting the peculiar nature of ideophones, also points to the fact that their mode of representation is depictive rather than descriptive, that is to say they enable listeners to experience what it is like to perceive a sensory image. Dingemanse (2009, 2011) notes that while the phonology and syntax of ideophones have been widely discussed, their semantics “(the meanings of ideophones) and social interaction (their actual use in discourse)” have ...
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Theoretical analyses of vowel harmony have typically divided harmony patterns into unbounded and ... more Theoretical analyses of vowel harmony have typically divided harmony patterns into unbounded and bounded. Unbounded harmony involves spreading the harmonic feature throughout the word. Bounded harmony, on the other hand, involves spreading within a specific word-internal domain. These two are exemplified in (1-2) below. In (1), tongue root harmony spreads leftward to the edge of the word, and as a result, all mid vowels agree for the feature, [ATR]. Compare this with bounded height harmony in the romance dialect Grado, shown in (2). Height harmony in Grado, often called metaphony, is triggered by a post-tonic high vowel, and spreads leftward up to the stressed vowel but no further. In (2b), where stress is penultimate, one mid vowel undergoes raising, leaving all pre-tonic vowels unaffected by harmony. In (2c-d,) stress is antepenultimate, and two mid vowels undergo raising. Thus, the domain of harmony in Grado is defined by stress and not by the word edge, like in Yoruba.
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Gesture, 2001
In Ghana, many peolple consider pointing by the left hand to be a taboo. We investigated conseque... more In Ghana, many peolple consider pointing by the left hand to be a taboo. We investigated consequences of this taboo on the Ghanaian gestural practice by observing gestures produced during naturalistic situations of giving route directions. First, there is a politeness convention to place the left hand on the lower back, as if to hide it from the interlocutor. Second, as a consequence of left-hand suppression, right-handed pointing may involve an anatomically staining position when indicating a leftward direction across the body. Third, pointing is sometimes performed with both hands together, which does not violate the taboo. Despite the taboo, left-handed pointing is not suppressed fully. Left-handed pointing gestures occur in association with the verbalization of the concept LEFT, suggesting the embodied nature of the concept. In addition, it is noteworthy that there is a class of left-handed gestures, which are so reduced in form that Ghanaians do not consider them as pointing fo...
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The Mental Lexicon, 2011
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The Kwa languages of West Africa have been analyzed as either tenseless (Manfredi 1991) or aspect... more The Kwa languages of West Africa have been analyzed as either tenseless (Manfredi 1991) or aspectprominent. For example Kropp Dakubu (1987: 60) notes that relations of tense or time sequence are not as important in the structure of the VP in Ga, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana, as relations of the kind commonly called aspectual: “whether or not an event or action is (or was or will be) actual and/or not.”Osam (2008) also argues that most of the forms that were analyzed as tense in Akan are actually aspectual forms that are becoming grammaticalized into tense. In the introduction to their edited volume of Aspect and Modality in Kwa, Ameka and Kropp Dabuku (2008) write:
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The Oxford Handbook of African Languages, 2020
In the late 1980s, the attention of linguists was drawn to the fact that the world’s languages ar... more In the late 1980s, the attention of linguists was drawn to the fact that the world’s languages are disappearing at an alarming rate. Since then, steps have been taken to revitalize those that can be revitalized but, most importantly, document the languages before they disappear. There is the perception, however, that even though Africa has about a third of the world’s languages, accounts of language endangerment do not take the specificities of the African situation into consideration. This chapter discusses the types of endangerment in Africa and the role African scholars are playing in documentation, as well as modest efforts at the revitalization of dying languages on the continent.
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Studies in Language, 2010
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Lingua, 2013
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We examine universals and crosslinguistic variation in constraints on event segmentation. Previ-o... more We examine universals and crosslinguistic variation in constraints on event segmentation. Previ-ous typological studies have focused on segmentation into syntactic (Pawley 1987) or intonational units (Givón 1991). We argue that the correlation between such units and semantic/conceptual event representations is language-specific. As an alternative, we introduce the ‘macro-event prop-erty ’ (MEP): a construction has the MEP if it packages event representations such that temporal operators necessarily have scope over all subevents. A case study on the segmentation of motion events into macro-event expressions in eighteen genetically and typologically diverse languages has produced evidence of two types of design principles that impact motion-event segmentation: language-specific lexicalization patterns and universal constraints on form-to-meaning mapping.* 1. TOWARD A SEMANTIC TYPOLOGY OF MOTION-EVENT SEGMENTATION. SEMANTIC TY-POLOGY is the comparative study of linguistic categorizati...
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The diversity in the coding of the core schema of motion, i.e., Path, has led to a traditional ty... more The diversity in the coding of the core schema of motion, i.e., Path, has led to a traditional typology of languages into verb-framed and satellite-framed languages. In the former Path is encoded in verbs and in the latter it is encoded in non-verb elements that function as sisters to co-event expressing verbs such as manner verbs. Verb serializing languages pose a challenge to this typology as they express Path as well as the Co-event of manner in finite verbs that together function as a single predicate in translational motion clause. We argue that these languages do not fit in the typology and constitute a type of their own. We draw on data from Akan and Frog story narrations in Ewe, a Kwa language, and Sranan, a Caribbean Creole with Gbe substrate, to show that in terms of discourse properties verb serializing languages behave like Verb-framed with respect to some properties and like Satellite-framed languages in terms of others. This study fed into the revision of the typology ...
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... Ewé. ; Grammaire transformationnelle. ; Théorie X-barre. ; Théorie du liage et du gouvernemen... more ... Ewé. ; Grammaire transformationnelle. ; Théorie X-barre. ; Théorie du liage et du gouvernement. ;Phrase nominale. ; Syntaxe. ; Structure syntaxique. ; Localisation / Location. INIST-CNRS, Cote INIST : 25737, 35400003553618.0030. Nº notice refdoc (ud4) : 3727137. ...
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Tutrugbu (Nyangbo) Language and Culture, 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Tutrugbu (Nyangbo) Language and Culture, 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Tutrugbu (Nyangbo) Language and Culture, 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The papers in this volume were presented at the 50th Annual Conference on African Linguistics hel... more The papers in this volume were presented at the 50th Annual Conference on African Linguistics held at the University of British Columbia in 2019. The contributions span a range of theoretical topics as well as topics in descriptive and applied linguistics. The papers reflect the typological and genetic diversity of languages in Africa and also represent the breadth of the ACAL community, with papers from both students and more senior scholars, based in North America and beyond. They thus provide a snapshot on current research in African linguistics, from multiple perspectives. To mark the 50th anniversary of the conference, the volume editors reminisce, in the introductory chapter, about their memorable ACALs.
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This is the introduction to the volume Celebrating 50 years of ACAL.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Dingemanse (2011: 133), describing the ideophone in Siwu (a Ghana-Togo Mountain language spoken i... more Dingemanse (2011: 133), describing the ideophone in Siwu (a Ghana-Togo Mountain language spoken in the Volta Region of Ghana), echoes their peculiarity thus: “its properties include deviant phonotactics, special word structures, expressive morphology, syntactic aloofness, foregrounded prosody, sensory semantics and a depictive mode of signification.” Peculiarity features prominently in his proposed definition (emphasis mine): “ideophones are marked words that depict sensory images” (Dingemanse 2011: 25). This definition, in addition to highlighting the peculiar nature of ideophones, also points to the fact that their mode of representation is depictive rather than descriptive, that is to say they enable listeners to experience what it is like to perceive a sensory image. Dingemanse (2009, 2011) notes that while the phonology and syntax of ideophones have been widely discussed, their semantics “(the meanings of ideophones) and social interaction (their actual use in discourse)” have ...
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Theoretical analyses of vowel harmony have typically divided harmony patterns into unbounded and ... more Theoretical analyses of vowel harmony have typically divided harmony patterns into unbounded and bounded. Unbounded harmony involves spreading the harmonic feature throughout the word. Bounded harmony, on the other hand, involves spreading within a specific word-internal domain. These two are exemplified in (1-2) below. In (1), tongue root harmony spreads leftward to the edge of the word, and as a result, all mid vowels agree for the feature, [ATR]. Compare this with bounded height harmony in the romance dialect Grado, shown in (2). Height harmony in Grado, often called metaphony, is triggered by a post-tonic high vowel, and spreads leftward up to the stressed vowel but no further. In (2b), where stress is penultimate, one mid vowel undergoes raising, leaving all pre-tonic vowels unaffected by harmony. In (2c-d,) stress is antepenultimate, and two mid vowels undergo raising. Thus, the domain of harmony in Grado is defined by stress and not by the word edge, like in Yoruba.
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Gesture, 2001
In Ghana, many peolple consider pointing by the left hand to be a taboo. We investigated conseque... more In Ghana, many peolple consider pointing by the left hand to be a taboo. We investigated consequences of this taboo on the Ghanaian gestural practice by observing gestures produced during naturalistic situations of giving route directions. First, there is a politeness convention to place the left hand on the lower back, as if to hide it from the interlocutor. Second, as a consequence of left-hand suppression, right-handed pointing may involve an anatomically staining position when indicating a leftward direction across the body. Third, pointing is sometimes performed with both hands together, which does not violate the taboo. Despite the taboo, left-handed pointing is not suppressed fully. Left-handed pointing gestures occur in association with the verbalization of the concept LEFT, suggesting the embodied nature of the concept. In addition, it is noteworthy that there is a class of left-handed gestures, which are so reduced in form that Ghanaians do not consider them as pointing fo...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Item does not contain fulltex
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Mental Lexicon, 2011
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Kwa languages of West Africa have been analyzed as either tenseless (Manfredi 1991) or aspect... more The Kwa languages of West Africa have been analyzed as either tenseless (Manfredi 1991) or aspectprominent. For example Kropp Dakubu (1987: 60) notes that relations of tense or time sequence are not as important in the structure of the VP in Ga, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana, as relations of the kind commonly called aspectual: “whether or not an event or action is (or was or will be) actual and/or not.”Osam (2008) also argues that most of the forms that were analyzed as tense in Akan are actually aspectual forms that are becoming grammaticalized into tense. In the introduction to their edited volume of Aspect and Modality in Kwa, Ameka and Kropp Dabuku (2008) write:
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Oxford Handbook of African Languages, 2020
In the late 1980s, the attention of linguists was drawn to the fact that the world’s languages ar... more In the late 1980s, the attention of linguists was drawn to the fact that the world’s languages are disappearing at an alarming rate. Since then, steps have been taken to revitalize those that can be revitalized but, most importantly, document the languages before they disappear. There is the perception, however, that even though Africa has about a third of the world’s languages, accounts of language endangerment do not take the specificities of the African situation into consideration. This chapter discusses the types of endangerment in Africa and the role African scholars are playing in documentation, as well as modest efforts at the revitalization of dying languages on the continent.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Studies in Language, 2010
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Lingua, 2013
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
We examine universals and crosslinguistic variation in constraints on event segmentation. Previ-o... more We examine universals and crosslinguistic variation in constraints on event segmentation. Previ-ous typological studies have focused on segmentation into syntactic (Pawley 1987) or intonational units (Givón 1991). We argue that the correlation between such units and semantic/conceptual event representations is language-specific. As an alternative, we introduce the ‘macro-event prop-erty ’ (MEP): a construction has the MEP if it packages event representations such that temporal operators necessarily have scope over all subevents. A case study on the segmentation of motion events into macro-event expressions in eighteen genetically and typologically diverse languages has produced evidence of two types of design principles that impact motion-event segmentation: language-specific lexicalization patterns and universal constraints on form-to-meaning mapping.* 1. TOWARD A SEMANTIC TYPOLOGY OF MOTION-EVENT SEGMENTATION. SEMANTIC TY-POLOGY is the comparative study of linguistic categorizati...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The diversity in the coding of the core schema of motion, i.e., Path, has led to a traditional ty... more The diversity in the coding of the core schema of motion, i.e., Path, has led to a traditional typology of languages into verb-framed and satellite-framed languages. In the former Path is encoded in verbs and in the latter it is encoded in non-verb elements that function as sisters to co-event expressing verbs such as manner verbs. Verb serializing languages pose a challenge to this typology as they express Path as well as the Co-event of manner in finite verbs that together function as a single predicate in translational motion clause. We argue that these languages do not fit in the typology and constitute a type of their own. We draw on data from Akan and Frog story narrations in Ewe, a Kwa language, and Sranan, a Caribbean Creole with Gbe substrate, to show that in terms of discourse properties verb serializing languages behave like Verb-framed with respect to some properties and like Satellite-framed languages in terms of others. This study fed into the revision of the typology ...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
... Ewé. ; Grammaire transformationnelle. ; Théorie X-barre. ; Théorie du liage et du gouvernemen... more ... Ewé. ; Grammaire transformationnelle. ; Théorie X-barre. ; Théorie du liage et du gouvernement. ;Phrase nominale. ; Syntaxe. ; Structure syntaxique. ; Localisation / Location. INIST-CNRS, Cote INIST : 25737, 35400003553618.0030. Nº notice refdoc (ud4) : 3727137. ...
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