Sara Petrollino | Universiteit Leiden (original) (raw)
Books by Sara Petrollino
Personal Names and Naming from an Anthropological-Linguistic Perspective, 2023
The Hamar are agro-pastoralist people inhabiting the southernmost corner of Ethiopia. Like many o... more The Hamar are agro-pastoralist people inhabiting the southernmost corner
of Ethiopia. Like many other pastoralist groups in Africa, their language is rich in words and expressions referring to the appearance of their cattle and goats (colours and patterns, horn shapes, brands, and ear cuts). The classification system for cattle appearance is extremely complex and it allows herders to provide detailed descriptions of animals’ appearances. This system is closely intertwined with livestock-centred naming
practices, in particular with individual appellations designated for adult humans and for livestock, particularly cattle. By studying the livestock-centred terms of address we can understand the organising principles of the Hamar descriptive system for cattle appearance. Hamar titles and appellations are employed as identification devices and as such they help to individuate people and heads of livestock; their referential and pragmatic function allows speakers to individuate people’s and animals’ statuses
within the community. In addition, these naming practices are key to understanding the categorisation system for cattle appearance, remember its structuring principles and transmit them to younger generations. Building on the existing anthropological literature and on the author’s first-hand collected data, the chapter provides an overview of Hamar naming practices with a focus on the livestock-centred system of address terms and its interconnectedness with the pastoral indigenous knowledge system.
Available at https://www.koeppe.de/get\_res\_src.php?fn=COS\_06\_Hamar.pdf&ft=PDF
Book chapters by Sara Petrollino
Theory and description in African Linguistics: Selected papers from the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics
This paper provides a preliminary description of the word-prosodic system of Hamar, a South Omoti... more This paper provides a preliminary description of the word-prosodic system of Hamar, a South Omotic language spoken in South West Ethiopia. The prosodic system of Hamar shows properties of both stress accent and tone: accent is lexically contrastive in nouns, but not in verbs, where it has a grammatical function. Post-lexical tonal oppositions arise when lexical accent and grammatical accent interact in both nouns and verbs. The prosodic behaviour of Hamar nouns and verbs is in line with the pattern proposed by Smith (2011), whereby nouns are higher than verbs in a hierarchy of phonological privilege.
In Bedilu Wakjira, Ronny Meyer, Zelealem Leyew (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethiopian languages , 2023
Articles by Sara Petrollino
Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, 2019
The following is a continuation of our comprehensive list of recently published books and monogra... more The following is a continuation of our comprehensive list of recently published books and monographs on African languages and linguistics. Prices are given where available. This list serves as an acknowledgement of receipt of review copies of the items marked (R). Copies of book reviews printed in the journal are automatically sent to the publishers. There can be no guarantee, however, that all works received will in fact be reviewed. Authors who would like to review a particular book or would like to be considered in general as potential reviewers are encouraged to write to the editor indicating their areal and topical fields of interest. [Sara Petrollino]
Language Sciences, 10.1016/j.langsci.2021.101448, 2022
The rich anthropological and ethnographic literature on cattle “color” and “pattern” terms has ar... more The rich anthropological and ethnographic literature on cattle “color” and “pattern” terms has argued for the central role of the cattle model in the visual systems of pastoral cultures. This study provides further evidence to the idea of a cattle model structuring pastoralists’ visual systems, and it explores the indigenous visual meanings of cattle “color” and “pattern” terms in Hamar, a language spoken in Southwest Ethiopia. The results show that pastoralists communicate and conceptualize all kind of visual experience in terms of cattle appearance: in the Hamar visual system features such as brightness, sheen and (de)saturation, rather than hue, are central to the meanings of at least some “color” terms; moreover, the conceptualization of categories referred to in mainstream languages as “stripes” or “dots” is based on features such as visual conspicuousness and stand-out effects rather than geometrical shape. The methods, tasks and stimuli used in the study were tailored for the collection of comparative data among different pastoral societies of East Africa. Their practical application is discussed, illustrating the effectiveness in revealing important aspects of cattle-centered meanings.
NJAS, 2019
This paper analyzes predicative constructions expressing location, existence and possession in Ha... more This paper analyzes predicative constructions expressing location, existence and possession in Hamar, a South Omotic language spoken in SouthWest Ethiopia. The semantic domain location-existence-possession is conveyed in Hamar by one and the same lexeme, but in different constructions. The distinction between location and existence in particular is expressed by variation in the syntax and information structure, reflecting the different conceptualization and perspectivization of the abstract relation between a figure and a ground. The semantic and syntactic properties of these constructions are analyzed and compared to the findings of Creissels' typology of "inverse locational predication" (2013) and Koch's constructional typology (2012). The analysis of existential predication in Hamar confirms that there is a contrast between the languages of the Sudanic belt and those of North Eastern Sub-Saharan Africa (Creissels 2018a; 2019), and it suggests that Hamar, like other Afro-Asiatic languages (Koch 2012:585), belongs to languages which do not express informational salience, nor propositional salience. A closer look however reveals that Hamar existential constructions display special morpho-syntactic features: the different conceptualization of the figure-ground relationship is encoded not only by means of word order alternations, but also by means of gender marking on the figure and the ground, and different aspectual marking on the predicator.
Hamar (South Omotic) has a complex and poorly studied verbal system. The article deals with posit... more Hamar (South Omotic) has a complex and poorly studied verbal system. The article deals with positive Imperative, Hortative and declarative verbal forms only, to the exclusion of negative verbal forms, as well as of verbs found in subordinate clauses. Interrogative forms, relative clauses and clefts will nevertheless be mentioned, since they have a role in the discussion. Likewise excluded is verbal derivation, as well as any deep analysis of the functional and semantic contents of the paradigms.
The Hamar verb is characterized by the almost total absence of subject-verb agreement (possibly an areal feature of extreme Southwest Ethiopia) and the widespread use of auxiliary and copula elements, which carry much of the TAM value and can even be compounded.
Aasá, a Cushitic language, was formerly spoken by a hunter- gatherer community that constitutes ... more Aasá, a Cushitic language, was formerly spoken by a hunter- gatherer community that constitutes a servant group to the Maasai in northern Tanzania. Given that none of the ethnic Aasá surveyed in this study had ever spoken this language, their memory of it is remarkable and raises questions about how it is remembered. In this article, we consider what our corpus of collected data reveals about the patterns of recollection of Aasá and compare these patterns with similar instances of lexical retrieval in second-language attrition. The divergent recollection patterns identified in our study can be explained within the context of the historical reconstruction of language shift from Aasá to Maasai. We conclude that the data collected represent the vestiges of a stage of the shift at which Aasá was no longer a full-fledged language.
In S. Michaelis., P. Maurer, M. Huber and M. Haspelmath (eds.), The Survey of Pidgin and Creole Languages Volume III. Contact Languages Based on Languages from Africa, Australia, and the Americas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 54-65., Jul 2013
Conference Presentations by Sara Petrollino
Digital Humanities Conference, 2020
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4261083 , 2020
A presentation at the 2020 Colloquium of African Languages and Linguistics, hosted at Leiden Univ... more A presentation at the 2020 Colloquium of African Languages and Linguistics, hosted at Leiden University. Available here: https://zenodo.org/record/4261083#.YC4-zxP0m00
Poster presented at DH2019, Utrecht
This is an overview of digital humanities initiatives and projects in Africa. The talk was given ... more This is an overview of digital humanities initiatives and projects in Africa. The talk was given during the workshop "Digital Humanities: the perspective of Africa" held at the Lorentz Center of Leiden University, July 2019. Link: https://dhafricablog.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/poster-2.pdf
Iraqw is the largest Southern Cushitic language of the Afro-Asiatic phylum and it is spoken in no... more Iraqw is the largest Southern Cushitic language of the Afro-Asiatic phylum and it is spoken in northern Tanzania by roughly half a million speakers. It is typologically different from Bantu languages spoken in Tanzania and from the official language Swahili, which is also a Bantu language. In my talk I will show and discuss some of the grammatical outcomes of multilingual production involving Iraqw, swahili, English and the Urban Youth Language spoken by a sample of young Iraqw speakers living in Dar Es Salaam. The starting point of my analysis has been the application of the conventional categories of borrowing and codeswitching on a corpus of eight informal conversations recorded in Dar Es Salaam. This material has provided instances of irregular codeswitching which do not fit in Myers-Scottonʼs Matrix Language Frame model, and has highlighted unusual strategies of multilingual production which have not been attested elsewhere in contact situations where societal multilingualism is the norm
Hamar, Omotic language spoken in south-west Ethiopia, has a peculiar noun classification system w... more Hamar, Omotic language spoken in south-west Ethiopia, has a peculiar noun classification system which shows properties of both inflection and derivation, and falls somewhere in between gender and classifier systems.
Gender (M and F) is well defined by agreement on verbs and nominal modifiers but does not provide an inherent classification of nouns: nouns are gender-less and can be inflected for both masculine and feminine regardless of their animacy degree:
qáski ‘dog’ ooní ‘house’ isín ‘sorghum’
qaskɛ̂ ‘dog.M’ ɔɔnɛ̂ ‘house.M’ isinɛ̂ ‘sorghum.M’
qáskino ‘dog.F’ onnó ‘house.F’ isínno ‘sorghum.F’
qáskina ‘dog.PL’ onná ‘house.PL’ isínna ‘sorghum.PL’
Gender marking in Hamar has semantic and pragmatic functions, and these functions may overlap.
Depending on the semantic profile of nouns, gender and number inflections may encode semantic values such as sex (on animate nouns), augmentative, diminutive, collective, distributive, paucal. Higher animates, such as domestic animals, usually have two feminine forms: one is used for reference to the female specimen, the other for reference to collective number. For lower animates and inanimates, F gender mark augmentation and collective number. M gender marks masculine biological gender in higher animates and diminution in nouns with inanimate reference. M can be used to express paucal number (i.e. ‘a little bit of’) in mass nouns. F and M gender can be associated with appreciation and depreciation (‘good’ vs. ‘bad’). Plural number refers to no more than two or three countable items. Collective number and larger quantity are usually expressed by F gender.
Apart from the association of gender with evaluative meanings, gender plays a crucial role in the encoding of several degrees of definiteness and it contributes to the organization of discourse. Whereby the general form is indefinite, inflecting a noun for gender allows for two degrees of definiteness: F gender encodes definiteness and denotes identifiable and generic referents; M gender on the other hand contrasts specific and referential entities. The use of M gender for referentiality and specificity correlates with other properties such as prominence in discourse: M gender is found often on focused constituents, in marked syntactic constructions and it is generally used for discourse recoverability and reference tracking. Reference tracking functions associated with nominal classification are usually reported for noun classifiers, rather than gender systems.
Personal Names and Naming from an Anthropological-Linguistic Perspective, 2023
The Hamar are agro-pastoralist people inhabiting the southernmost corner of Ethiopia. Like many o... more The Hamar are agro-pastoralist people inhabiting the southernmost corner
of Ethiopia. Like many other pastoralist groups in Africa, their language is rich in words and expressions referring to the appearance of their cattle and goats (colours and patterns, horn shapes, brands, and ear cuts). The classification system for cattle appearance is extremely complex and it allows herders to provide detailed descriptions of animals’ appearances. This system is closely intertwined with livestock-centred naming
practices, in particular with individual appellations designated for adult humans and for livestock, particularly cattle. By studying the livestock-centred terms of address we can understand the organising principles of the Hamar descriptive system for cattle appearance. Hamar titles and appellations are employed as identification devices and as such they help to individuate people and heads of livestock; their referential and pragmatic function allows speakers to individuate people’s and animals’ statuses
within the community. In addition, these naming practices are key to understanding the categorisation system for cattle appearance, remember its structuring principles and transmit them to younger generations. Building on the existing anthropological literature and on the author’s first-hand collected data, the chapter provides an overview of Hamar naming practices with a focus on the livestock-centred system of address terms and its interconnectedness with the pastoral indigenous knowledge system.
Available at https://www.koeppe.de/get\_res\_src.php?fn=COS\_06\_Hamar.pdf&ft=PDF
Theory and description in African Linguistics: Selected papers from the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics
This paper provides a preliminary description of the word-prosodic system of Hamar, a South Omoti... more This paper provides a preliminary description of the word-prosodic system of Hamar, a South Omotic language spoken in South West Ethiopia. The prosodic system of Hamar shows properties of both stress accent and tone: accent is lexically contrastive in nouns, but not in verbs, where it has a grammatical function. Post-lexical tonal oppositions arise when lexical accent and grammatical accent interact in both nouns and verbs. The prosodic behaviour of Hamar nouns and verbs is in line with the pattern proposed by Smith (2011), whereby nouns are higher than verbs in a hierarchy of phonological privilege.
In Bedilu Wakjira, Ronny Meyer, Zelealem Leyew (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethiopian languages , 2023
Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, 2019
The following is a continuation of our comprehensive list of recently published books and monogra... more The following is a continuation of our comprehensive list of recently published books and monographs on African languages and linguistics. Prices are given where available. This list serves as an acknowledgement of receipt of review copies of the items marked (R). Copies of book reviews printed in the journal are automatically sent to the publishers. There can be no guarantee, however, that all works received will in fact be reviewed. Authors who would like to review a particular book or would like to be considered in general as potential reviewers are encouraged to write to the editor indicating their areal and topical fields of interest. [Sara Petrollino]
Language Sciences, 10.1016/j.langsci.2021.101448, 2022
The rich anthropological and ethnographic literature on cattle “color” and “pattern” terms has ar... more The rich anthropological and ethnographic literature on cattle “color” and “pattern” terms has argued for the central role of the cattle model in the visual systems of pastoral cultures. This study provides further evidence to the idea of a cattle model structuring pastoralists’ visual systems, and it explores the indigenous visual meanings of cattle “color” and “pattern” terms in Hamar, a language spoken in Southwest Ethiopia. The results show that pastoralists communicate and conceptualize all kind of visual experience in terms of cattle appearance: in the Hamar visual system features such as brightness, sheen and (de)saturation, rather than hue, are central to the meanings of at least some “color” terms; moreover, the conceptualization of categories referred to in mainstream languages as “stripes” or “dots” is based on features such as visual conspicuousness and stand-out effects rather than geometrical shape. The methods, tasks and stimuli used in the study were tailored for the collection of comparative data among different pastoral societies of East Africa. Their practical application is discussed, illustrating the effectiveness in revealing important aspects of cattle-centered meanings.
NJAS, 2019
This paper analyzes predicative constructions expressing location, existence and possession in Ha... more This paper analyzes predicative constructions expressing location, existence and possession in Hamar, a South Omotic language spoken in SouthWest Ethiopia. The semantic domain location-existence-possession is conveyed in Hamar by one and the same lexeme, but in different constructions. The distinction between location and existence in particular is expressed by variation in the syntax and information structure, reflecting the different conceptualization and perspectivization of the abstract relation between a figure and a ground. The semantic and syntactic properties of these constructions are analyzed and compared to the findings of Creissels' typology of "inverse locational predication" (2013) and Koch's constructional typology (2012). The analysis of existential predication in Hamar confirms that there is a contrast between the languages of the Sudanic belt and those of North Eastern Sub-Saharan Africa (Creissels 2018a; 2019), and it suggests that Hamar, like other Afro-Asiatic languages (Koch 2012:585), belongs to languages which do not express informational salience, nor propositional salience. A closer look however reveals that Hamar existential constructions display special morpho-syntactic features: the different conceptualization of the figure-ground relationship is encoded not only by means of word order alternations, but also by means of gender marking on the figure and the ground, and different aspectual marking on the predicator.
Hamar (South Omotic) has a complex and poorly studied verbal system. The article deals with posit... more Hamar (South Omotic) has a complex and poorly studied verbal system. The article deals with positive Imperative, Hortative and declarative verbal forms only, to the exclusion of negative verbal forms, as well as of verbs found in subordinate clauses. Interrogative forms, relative clauses and clefts will nevertheless be mentioned, since they have a role in the discussion. Likewise excluded is verbal derivation, as well as any deep analysis of the functional and semantic contents of the paradigms.
The Hamar verb is characterized by the almost total absence of subject-verb agreement (possibly an areal feature of extreme Southwest Ethiopia) and the widespread use of auxiliary and copula elements, which carry much of the TAM value and can even be compounded.
Aasá, a Cushitic language, was formerly spoken by a hunter- gatherer community that constitutes ... more Aasá, a Cushitic language, was formerly spoken by a hunter- gatherer community that constitutes a servant group to the Maasai in northern Tanzania. Given that none of the ethnic Aasá surveyed in this study had ever spoken this language, their memory of it is remarkable and raises questions about how it is remembered. In this article, we consider what our corpus of collected data reveals about the patterns of recollection of Aasá and compare these patterns with similar instances of lexical retrieval in second-language attrition. The divergent recollection patterns identified in our study can be explained within the context of the historical reconstruction of language shift from Aasá to Maasai. We conclude that the data collected represent the vestiges of a stage of the shift at which Aasá was no longer a full-fledged language.
In S. Michaelis., P. Maurer, M. Huber and M. Haspelmath (eds.), The Survey of Pidgin and Creole Languages Volume III. Contact Languages Based on Languages from Africa, Australia, and the Americas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 54-65., Jul 2013
Digital Humanities Conference, 2020
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4261083 , 2020
A presentation at the 2020 Colloquium of African Languages and Linguistics, hosted at Leiden Univ... more A presentation at the 2020 Colloquium of African Languages and Linguistics, hosted at Leiden University. Available here: https://zenodo.org/record/4261083#.YC4-zxP0m00
Poster presented at DH2019, Utrecht
This is an overview of digital humanities initiatives and projects in Africa. The talk was given ... more This is an overview of digital humanities initiatives and projects in Africa. The talk was given during the workshop "Digital Humanities: the perspective of Africa" held at the Lorentz Center of Leiden University, July 2019. Link: https://dhafricablog.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/poster-2.pdf
Iraqw is the largest Southern Cushitic language of the Afro-Asiatic phylum and it is spoken in no... more Iraqw is the largest Southern Cushitic language of the Afro-Asiatic phylum and it is spoken in northern Tanzania by roughly half a million speakers. It is typologically different from Bantu languages spoken in Tanzania and from the official language Swahili, which is also a Bantu language. In my talk I will show and discuss some of the grammatical outcomes of multilingual production involving Iraqw, swahili, English and the Urban Youth Language spoken by a sample of young Iraqw speakers living in Dar Es Salaam. The starting point of my analysis has been the application of the conventional categories of borrowing and codeswitching on a corpus of eight informal conversations recorded in Dar Es Salaam. This material has provided instances of irregular codeswitching which do not fit in Myers-Scottonʼs Matrix Language Frame model, and has highlighted unusual strategies of multilingual production which have not been attested elsewhere in contact situations where societal multilingualism is the norm
Hamar, Omotic language spoken in south-west Ethiopia, has a peculiar noun classification system w... more Hamar, Omotic language spoken in south-west Ethiopia, has a peculiar noun classification system which shows properties of both inflection and derivation, and falls somewhere in between gender and classifier systems.
Gender (M and F) is well defined by agreement on verbs and nominal modifiers but does not provide an inherent classification of nouns: nouns are gender-less and can be inflected for both masculine and feminine regardless of their animacy degree:
qáski ‘dog’ ooní ‘house’ isín ‘sorghum’
qaskɛ̂ ‘dog.M’ ɔɔnɛ̂ ‘house.M’ isinɛ̂ ‘sorghum.M’
qáskino ‘dog.F’ onnó ‘house.F’ isínno ‘sorghum.F’
qáskina ‘dog.PL’ onná ‘house.PL’ isínna ‘sorghum.PL’
Gender marking in Hamar has semantic and pragmatic functions, and these functions may overlap.
Depending on the semantic profile of nouns, gender and number inflections may encode semantic values such as sex (on animate nouns), augmentative, diminutive, collective, distributive, paucal. Higher animates, such as domestic animals, usually have two feminine forms: one is used for reference to the female specimen, the other for reference to collective number. For lower animates and inanimates, F gender mark augmentation and collective number. M gender marks masculine biological gender in higher animates and diminution in nouns with inanimate reference. M can be used to express paucal number (i.e. ‘a little bit of’) in mass nouns. F and M gender can be associated with appreciation and depreciation (‘good’ vs. ‘bad’). Plural number refers to no more than two or three countable items. Collective number and larger quantity are usually expressed by F gender.
Apart from the association of gender with evaluative meanings, gender plays a crucial role in the encoding of several degrees of definiteness and it contributes to the organization of discourse. Whereby the general form is indefinite, inflecting a noun for gender allows for two degrees of definiteness: F gender encodes definiteness and denotes identifiable and generic referents; M gender on the other hand contrasts specific and referential entities. The use of M gender for referentiality and specificity correlates with other properties such as prominence in discourse: M gender is found often on focused constituents, in marked syntactic constructions and it is generally used for discourse recoverability and reference tracking. Reference tracking functions associated with nominal classification are usually reported for noun classifiers, rather than gender systems.
This tutorial is based on ELAN 4.9.4 Sierra/5.1 (Mac OS) and FLEx 8 running on Windows XP (Parall... more This tutorial is based on ELAN 4.9.4 Sierra/5.1 (Mac OS) and FLEx 8 running on Windows XP (Parallels Windows) but the method will work also with other versions of ELAN and FLEx. The method for exporting and importing into FLEx/ELAN is by Tim Gaved and Sophie Salfnner. This is not a complete tutorial, many details have been left out for the purpose of the course.
ASC occasional publication, 2020
This book celebrates Maarten Mous, professor of African Linguistics at Leiden University. For man... more This book celebrates Maarten Mous, professor of African Linguistics at Leiden University. For many people engaged in the field of African linguistics (and beyond), Maarten has been a teacher, an engaged colleague, and an inspiration. On the occasion of his 65th birthday, the present volume offers essays written by his former and current PhD students. The volume is divided into four sections: Language in use and contact, Morphosyntax, Number and numerals, and Phonology. It contains 25 articles and presents a variety of disciplinary and regional approaches to African linguistics.bookDescriptive and Comparative Linguistic
ASC occasional publication, 2020
This book celebrates Maarten Mous, professor of African Linguistics at Leiden University. For man... more This book celebrates Maarten Mous, professor of African Linguistics at Leiden University. For many people engaged in the field of African linguistics (and beyond), Maarten has been a teacher, an engaged colleague, and an inspiration. On the occasion of his 65th birthday, the present volume offers essays written by his former and current PhD students. The volume is divided into four sections: Language in use and contact, Morphosyntax, Number and numerals, and Phonology. It contains 25 articles and presents a variety of disciplinary and regional approaches to African linguistics.