The noncausal/causal alternation in African languages: An introduction (original) (raw)
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The noncausal/causal alternation in Kagulu, an East Ruvu Bantu language of Tanzania
Dom, Bar-el, Kanijo & Petzell. 2023. The noncausal/causal alternation in Kagulu, an East Ruvu Bantu language of Tanzania. JALL 44(2)., 2023
This paper explores the formal correspondences between the members of verb pairs participating in the noncausal/causal alternation in Kagulu, a Bantu language from Tanzania. Our investigation shows that Kagulu has a predominance of equipollent verb pairs, with the anticausative and causative correspondences following close behind. We argue that, diachronically, the causative correspondence was much more prominent than it is in present-day Kagulu. However, due to morphophonological changes triggered by the historical causative suffix *-i, a significant number of verb pairs that are diachronically causative can be synchronically reanalyzed as equipollent. This study highlights the complexity of diachronic morphology in synchronic analyses of comparative-typological phenomena such as the noncausal/causal alternation, and contributes to the growing body of research on noncausal/causal verb pairs in African languages.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 1992
Book Reviews lection of papers emerged from a working conference on Amazonian Languages held at the University of Oregon in 1987, attended by North American, Brazilian, and British linguists. Although some of the papers take an explicitly historicalcomparative focus, others are concerned with particular issues in individual languages. Yet because these always seem to refer to the comparativists' concerns with universals and the differences between syntactic and historical processes, the book has an unusually strong coherence. The two general papers (by Doris Payne, David Payne, Derbyshire and Doris Payne; Jensen, Dooley, and Wise), which are concerned with exploring problems emerging from preliminary attempts to specify general morphological characteristics of South American languages, and the specific discussions of individual languages, are especially interesting for their examination of practical problems in analysis. The authors examine a variety of current theories for their value in helping to solve these problems. Included is discussion of the differences between clitics and particles (Dooley); derivations of noun classification systems (Derbyshire and Doris Payne; Barnes on Tuyuca); noun incorporation (Weir on Nadeb); word formation (Dietrich on Chiriguano and Guarayo); ergativity, nominativity, and transitivity (Francetto on Kuikuro; Thomas Payne on Panare); scope, grammatical rule, and discourse pragmatic control (Dooley; Hoff on Carib); and cognitive processing issues (Lowe on Nambikuara). The South American language data often suggest interesting revisions to these theories. Terence Kaufman's paper "Language History in South America: What We Know and How to Know More" includes an assessment of the (very weak) foundation for Greenberg's recent classification of South American languages. At the same time Kaufman uses, as the basis of a plan of his own, Greenberg's central idea: "compare a rather large standard set of basic vocabulary and grammatical morphemes in all the languages of a particular area in order to catalog similarities in sound and meaning and generate hypotheses about genetic relatedness" (p. 17). Following this, Kaufman describes procedures for the comparative method, including the formulation and evaluation of phonological, lexical, and grammatical reconstructions, that show just how dedicated one must be to do such work-a life's work, as he says. The kind of detailed information on languages needed for making any well-founded statements about genetic affiliation is elaborate indeed, which makes basic data-gathering particularly urgent.
Current issues in the morphosyntactic typology of Sub-Saharan languages
published in Tom Güldemann (ed.), The languages and linguistics of Africa. Mouton De Gruyter. 712-821., 2018
This paper does not aim at providing a general survey of morphosyntactic phenomena already signaled as particularly frequent or rare among Sub-Saharan languages, or showing a particular genetic or areal distribution in Sub-Saharan Africa. The idea here is rather to select topics on which recently published works shed some new light, or which I consider particularly promising on the basis of my own descriptive work on individual languages, or my participation in collective research projects. The questions discussed in this paper are grouped under the following five headings: – Nouns and noun phrases (section 2) – Argument structure and valency operations (section 3) – Clause structure (section 4) – Complex constructions (section 5) – Information structure (section 6)
2013
Adjectives in Basaá [ɓasaá] (Bantu, A43: Cameroon) are morphologically nominal: they possess inherent noun class and distinguish singular and plural (Dimmendaal 1988, Hyman 2003). Additionally, adjectives in Basaá function as the head of their noun phrase, in a sense to be made precise below. This challenges the standard assumption that noun phrases or DPs are projected (or headed) by nouns. This paper provides an analysis of adjectives in Basaá which takes seriously the categorical status of Basaá adjectives as nouns, but proposes that these adjectives are syntactic predicates of the noun they modify, moving to their position as nominal heads by Predicate Inversion. The status of adjectives as nominal heads can be seen in the example below, in which the adjective occurs in the position of the head noun and controls concord on its dependents, including the phrase containing the noun it modifies (Hyman 2003):
The noncausal/causal alternation in Swahili
Linguistique et langues africaines, 2022
Haspelmath (1993) investigates types of noncausal/causal alternation and examines 31 noncausal/ causal verb pairs in 21 languages, including Swahili, a Bantu language spoken in East Africa. He divides the alternation patterns into causative, anticausative, and non-directed alternations. His data suggest that Swahili is not clearly either a causative or anticausative type of language, since 11 out of these 31 pairs exhibit the causative alternation, while 11 other pairs exhibit the anticausative alternation. However, his analysis does not consider spirantization, a diachronic phonological change where consonants became fricatives in front of high vowels or glides, such as k + y > sh. If such diachronic phonological changes are taken into account when analysing noncausal/causal verb pairs in Swahili, 18 of the 31 pairs can be classified as belonging to the causative correspondence type. This demonstrates a clear causative tendency in Swahili, even more so than in other Bantu languages, such as Matengo and Herero. Comrie (2006) concludes that Swahili is an exception to his hypothesis on the markedness of noncausal/causal distribution, which states that the more spontaneous a noncausal verb, the more unmarked the noncausal verb form. In contrast, the less spontaneous a noncausal verb form, the more unmarked the causal verb form. This study, however, finds that Swahili is not an exception to, but rather a confirmation of Comrie's hypothesis.
Theory and description in African Linguistics
2019
The papers in this volume were presented at the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics at UC Berkeley in 2016. The papers offer new descriptions of African languages and propose novel theoretical analyses of them. The contributions span topics in phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics and reflect the typological and genetic diversity of languages in Africa. Four papers in the volume examine Areal Features and Linguistic Reconstruction in Africa, and were presented at a special workshop on this topic held alongside the general session of ACAL.
Arusha Working Papers in African Linguistics, Vol. 1
2018
This is a study of the reversive verb derivation-ul-in Swahili, with particular attention to its meaning and its place among derivational suffixes. This article describes its phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic features. It is noted the affix is associated with several other meanings: among these intensive, causative, iterative, and separative. For this reason, the reversive is often described as unproductive and lexicalized. We argue that the causative reading is a result of homophony and is not reversive. Using the prototype approach we argue that these diverse meanings form a family for which the reversive sense is a good exemplar. They result from polysemy, which has also been shown to exist in the semantics of productive derivations, including the causative, applicative, and reciprocal. This study also explores the reversive suffix's position to other verb derivational suffixes. It reports on the findings of a search for pairwise combinations of the reversive and other extensions (applicative, causative, reciprocal, passive, and stative) from the Helsinki Corpus of Swahili. In all cases, the reversive appears before any other suffixes. We conclude that this is consistent with both scope theory and relevance theory.
Oxford Handbook of African Languages, 2020
The Mande language Dan, which is spoken in the West African countries of Guinea, the Ivory Coast, and Liberia, is among the few African languages that distinguish between five tone registers. Metrical feet in this language play a role with respect to nasal harmo ny as well as tonal and vocalic combinations. This chapter also presents a general overview of simple and complex sentences, with a special focus on locative marking, which constitutes a prominent morphosyntactic feature of Dan nouns, as well as on labili ty, which is a typologically interesting feature of the other major category in the lan guage, the verb.