Serge Sagna - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Serge Sagna

Word Structure

We present an exploratory study of 2- to 3-year-old children’s acquisition of the demonstrative s... more We present an exploratory study of 2- to 3-year-old children’s acquisition of the demonstrative system of Eegimaa (ISO 369–3 bqj), an endangered language belonging to the Jóola cluster of the Atlantic family of the Niger-Congo phylum, spoken by about 13,000 speakers in southwestern Senegal. Eegimaa demonstratives express distance from speaker (proximal, medial and distal) and the agreement categories of number and gender, as well as having four morphological types that create an additional dimension of complexity for children to learn. These demonstrative types are each associated with a range of syntactic functions with partial overlaps. From nearly seven hours of recordings, including children at three age points (2;0, 2;6 and 3;0), we extracted 218 demonstrative tokens from the children’s speech, matched with 205 tokens from a sub-sample of caregiver speech. The youngest children can be described as restricting their use of demonstratives to a small set of learned items, with evi...

Research engagement material produced as part of a research impact output for the "Matches a... more Research engagement material produced as part of a research impact output for the "Matches and mismatches" child language acquisition project funded by the ESRC and AHRC (ES/P000304/1)

First Language

Research on lesser studied languages is vital for the advancement of theories of language acquisi... more Research on lesser studied languages is vital for the advancement of theories of language acquisition. We discuss two areas where data from Eegimaa have the potential to produce innovative research: (1) language typology, with an overview of the complex demonstratives found in this language, and (2) learning environment and input speech. Here, we show that Eegimaa children learn to speak in a polyadic environment, where they receive input from multiple caregivers, siblings and other members of their community.

This archive contains a unique collection of naturalistic child language data collected between 2... more This archive contains a unique collection of naturalistic child language data collected between 2017 and 2020 in Southern Senegal. The deposit contains ELAN files of annotated data based on recordings of children's production and child directed speech in naturalistic settings. The language under investigation is Eegimaa, a Jóola language of sourthern Senegal. This is part of the Atlantic branch of the Niger‑Congo Phylum. The data was collected as part of a research project which investigates the acquisition of an Atlantic noun class system. Our research looks at the factors underlying children's learning of nominal class prefixes and syntactic and semantic agreement at the level of the NP. We focus on questions including the following. • Which elements of noun class morphology do children begin to use productively? • What is the role of input frequency, morphological salience, and transparency in children acquisition of noun class and agreement in Eegimaa? • Are errors in th...

International Journal of Bilingualism, 2021

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: The former region of southern Senegal, the Casama... more Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: The former region of southern Senegal, the Casamance, has been portrayed throughout the literature on African multilingualism in a singular light, for example, as an area where monolingualism does not exist. The purpose of this article is to stress the previously unacknowledged importance of monolingual settings and practices by discussing data that have yet to be presented in the literature. Design/Methodology/Approach: We investigate rural multilingualism and monolingualism across the Casamance by carrying out the following four studies: (a) we conduct a survey of 62 villages with a questionnaire and our newly created ‘blindfold test’, classifying them into two main types; (b) with 34 women we study the role of exogamy in multilingual language acquisition in one of the villages; (c) we analyse child language production data and child directed speech to examine the existence of monolingual language acquisition; (d) we examine the soci...

Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, 2020

The role of syllable weight in Gújjolaay Eegimaa, an Atlantic language spoken in south-western Se... more The role of syllable weight in Gújjolaay Eegimaa, an Atlantic language spoken in south-western Senegal, is evidenced by reduplicative patterns in the perfective stem, where we witness a difference in the surface representation of verb roots with underlying voiced obstruents from those with underlying voiceless obstruents. We argue that voiced plosives are weight bearing and therefore considered as moraic when in coda position in this language. We attribute the triggering of the gemination in the reduplicative perfective with roots having final voiced plosives to compensatory lengthening in order to make up for the loss of a mora as motivated by Hayes (1989). Gemination, rather than vowel lengthening, occurs because, as stated by de Chene and Anderson (1979) compensatory lengthening of vowels only occurs in a language where vowel length is contrastive. In this paper, we show evidence to support the proposition that there are no long vowels in this variety of Eegimaa, and therefore ge...

This paper advocates the integration of ethnographic information such as anthroponymy in language... more This paper advocates the integration of ethnographic information such as anthroponymy in language documentation, by discussing the results of the documentation of personal names among speakers of Gujjolaay Eegimaa. Our study shows that Eegimaa proper names include names that may be termed ‘meaningless names’, because their meanings are virtually impossible to identify, and meaningful names, i.e. names whose meanings are semantically transparent. Two main types of meaningful proper names are identified: those that describe aspects of an individual’s physic or character, and ritual names which are termed death prevention names. Death prevention names include names given to women who undergo the Gannalen ‘birth ritual’ to help them with pregnancy and birthgiving, and those given to children to fight infant mortality. We provide an analysis of the morphological structures and the meanings of proper names and investigate name changing practices among Eegimaa speakers. Our study shows tha...

The Italian Journal of Linguistics, 2017

It is rare for a language to be able to use noun class markers in the nominal domain to categoris... more It is rare for a language to be able to use noun class markers in the nominal domain to categorise entities, and at the same time, use these same linguistic markers to categorise events from the verbal domain. Such a system can be found in Eegimaa and some other related Atlantic languages spoken in the Basse-Casamance area of Southern Senegal, where non-finite verbs and the events they refer to are classified using several different noun class prefixes. In these languages, the use of individual noun class markers as non-finite verb classificatory markers is lexically determined. But, there are also instances where different noun class prefixes can alternate on verbal stems. Whenever these alternations are attested, one of the alternants must be 'e'-, and the other can be any prefix attested on non-finite verbs, including class prefixes ga- and ba- which are studied here. I show that in these alternations, class marker e- is used to express event delimitation by expressing fe...

Gujjolaay Eegimaa (G.E.), an Atlantic language of the Niger-Congo phylum spoken in the Basse-Casa... more Gujjolaay Eegimaa (G.E.), an Atlantic language of the Niger-Congo phylum spoken in the Basse-Casamance area in Senegal, exhibits a system of nominal classification known as a "gender/ noun class system". In this type of nominal classification system which is prevalent in Niger-Congo languages, there is controversy as to whether the obligatory classification of all nouns into a finite number of classes has semantic motivations. In addition to the disputed issue of the semantic basis of the nominal classification, the formal criteria for assigning nouns into classes are also disputed in Joola languages and in G.E. In this PhD thesis, I propose an investigation of the formal and semantic properties of the nominal classification system of Gujjolaay Eegimaa (G.E). Based on cross-linguistic and language-specific research, I propose formal criteria whose application led to the discovery of fifteen noun classes in G.E. Here, I argue that the G.E. noun class system has semantic mot...

The goal of this paper is to provide an account of the documentation of the ethnobotanical knowle... more The goal of this paper is to provide an account of the documentation of the ethnobotanical knowledge and classification among the speakers of Gujjolaay Eegimaa, an endangered Atlantic and Niger-Congo language spoken by less than 10,000 speakers in Southern Senegal. The assumption made here is that language documentation seeks, among other things, to capture the individual and collective theoretical and practical knowledge and experience of a people about their environment. Such knowledge is, as argued in the literature, encoded in language e.g., in noun class systems where plant names and other nouns are grouped into classes (Coelho, 2006, Foley, 1997, Messineo and Cuneo, 2011) reflecting the way speakers categorise entities which make up their world (D'Andrade, 1995). The paper discusses the strengths and limitations of the research techniques used during the documentation of the Eegimaa speakers’ ethnobotanical knowledge. These techniques include native speaker intuition, elic...

Studies in African Linguistics, 2010

In his book on gender Corbett observes that establishing the number of genders or noun classes in... more In his book on gender Corbett observes that establishing the number of genders or noun classes in a given language ‘can be the subject of interminable dispute’ (1991: 145). Jóola like Gújjolaay Eegimaa (bqj, Atlantic, Niger-Congo) have noun class systems exhibiting irregular singular-plural matchings and complex agreement correspondences between controller nouns and their targets, resulting in endless disagreements among authors in Jóola linguistics. This paper addresses the issues surrounding noun class assignment in Gújjolaay Eegimaa (Eegimaa henceforth) and other Jóola languages. It provides a critical evaluation of the noun class assignment criteria used for those languages and proposes cross-linguistic and language-specific diagnostic criteria to account for the noun class system of Eegimaa and other related languages that exhibit a similar system.

Studies in Language, 2019

Typological research on agreement systems recognises syntactic and semantic agreement as the two ... more Typological research on agreement systems recognises syntactic and semantic agreement as the two main types of agreement, with the former considered to be more canonical. An examination of different manifestations of semantic agreement found in the Gújjolaay Eegimaa1 noun class (non sex based gender) system is proposed in this paper from the perspective of Canonical Typology, and the findings are related to the Agreement Hierarchy predictions. The results show that Eegimaa has hybrid nouns and constructional mismatches which trigger semantically based agreement mismatches, both in gender and number between controller nouns and certain targets. This paper shows that Eegimaa has two main subtypes of semantic agreement: human semantic agreement and locative semantic agreement. The data and the analysis proposed here reveal novel results according to which these two types of semantic agreement behave differently in relation to the Agreement Hierarchy.

humanities.manchester.ac.uk

Gújjolaay Eegimaa (Eegimaa henceforth) 2 has a noun class system whereby prefixes combine with no... more Gújjolaay Eegimaa (Eegimaa henceforth) 2 has a noun class system whereby prefixes combine with noun stems to simultaneously mark class membership and number. The language distinguishes fifteen noun classes of which 12 are involved in singular-plural ...

Cognitive Linguistics, 2012

This paper investigates the semantic bases of class membership in the noun class system of Gújjol... more This paper investigates the semantic bases of class membership in the noun class system of Gújjolaay Eegimaa (Eegimaa henceforth), a Niger-Congo and Atlantic language of the BAK group spoken in Southern Senegal. The question of whether semantic principles underlie the overt classification of nouns in Niger-Congo languages is a controversial one. There is a common perception of Niger-Congo noun class systems as being mainly semantically arbitrary. The goal of the present paper is to show that physical properties and culture-specific factors are central principles of semantic categorisation in the Eegimaa noun class system. I argue that the Eegimaa overt grammatical classification of nouns into classes is a semantic categorisation system whereby categories are structured according to prototypicality, family resemblance, metaphorical and metonymic extensions and chaining processes, as argued within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. I show that the categorisation of entities in th...

Studies in African Linguistics, 2019

This paper presents some of the most prominent properties of Eegimaa, a Jóola/Diola2 language spo... more This paper presents some of the most prominent properties of Eegimaa, a Jóola/Diola2 language spoken in the Basse-Casamance (Southern Senegal). The phonological features examined include [ATR] vowel harmony, backness harmony, lenition, and Eegimaa’s typologically unusual geminate consonants. Most of the paper, however, focuses on Eegimaa morphology. My analysis of the noun class system separates morphological classes from agreement classes (genders), and presents the most important principles of semantic categorization, including shape encoding. I also show that Eegimaa classifies nouns and verbs by the same overt linguistic means, namely, noun class prefixes. I argue that this overt classification of nouns and verbs reflects parallel semantic categorization of entities and events. Other prominent typological features include associative plural marking and nominal TAM marking with the inactualis suffix, which also expresses alienability contrasts.