Grammars and Sketches of the World's Languages Africa (original) (raw)
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A grammar of Mursi, a Nilo-Saharan language
2020
My special thanks goes to Brigitta Flick and Betsy Bradshaw who corrected grammatical, technical and stylistic errors of this grammar. For various administrative issues, David Ellis, Amanda Parsonage and Jolene Overall, thanks a lot for your generous support and time.
Grammars and Sketches of the World's Languages Africa, 2021
I am very grateful to the following people and institutions for giving me their advice, knowledge, trust, encouragement, time, material, and money. Without their support, I would not have been able to finish this grammar. First and foremost, I would like to thank the Mursi society who taught me their language and culture. Most of all, I would like to thank my supervisors at the Language and Culture Research Centre (LCRC) of James Cook University, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and R.M.W. Dixon, who have been my mentors and constant sources of linguistic knowledge during my time in Cairns. I have learned a lot from your abundant knowledge that made me recheck my data, rethink the data and the analysis, including many of the views presented in this grammar. Second, I thank my fieldwork Mursi consultants, Barihuny Girinomeri Araro Toko (primary consultant), Barkadhe Kulumedere (secondary consultant),
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.
Arusha Working Papers in African Linguistics, Vol. 5
2023
Iraqw has a number of preverbal elements that are compounded to the verb and some of these have functions similar to an applicative. These compounds are not fully productive and are prone to lexicalisations. One of them, hara, doubles as a preposition. The grammaticalisation of a number of these preverbal elements allows us to study the process of development from preposition (and other independent elements) to verbal applicative marker.
2005
Tuwuli is a Kwa language spoken by about 11,000 people in the mountainous and linguistically diverse Central Volta Region of Ghana. It is one of a group of at least 14 poorly described minority languages, often referred to as the "Central-Togo" group. As well as bringing to light much new linguistic data, this thesis shows that Tuwuli is a language with many unusual typological properties. Tuwuli"s noun-class system is of particular interest because it is motivated primarily by the plural forms rather than by the combination of the singular and plural forms, as is typically the case in Bantu languages. Phonologically, Tuwuli is interesting because it is one of the few Volta-Congo languages displaying a seven-vowel system with cross-height ATR and labial vowel harmony. Regarding verb structure, verbs in Tuwuli can carry up to six prefixes and one suffix simultaneously; few, if any, Kwa languages can boast such agglutinativity. One of the verbal prefixes functions as a type of auxiliary focus-marker and betrays a clear link with the marking of negation. At the syntactic level, Tuwuli exhibits a wide variety of argument structures; whilst cognate object constructions are almost entirely absent, at least eight different types of monotransitive and ditransitive construction can be identified by the syntactic properties of the verb and its complement(s).
1 The Bantu Grammar: Description and Theory Network
2006
The collection of papers in this volume presents results of a collaborative project between the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, the Zentrum für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie und Universalienforschung (ZAS) in Berlin, and the University of Leiden. All three institutions have a strong interest in the linguistics of Bantu languages, and in 2003 decided to set up a network to compare results and to provide a platform for on-going discussion of different topics on which their research interests converged. The project received funding from the British Academy International Networks Programme, and from 2003 to 2006 seven meetings were held at the institutions involved under the title Bantu Grammar: Description and Theory, indicating the shared belief that current research in Bantu is best served by combining the description of new data with theoretically informed analysis. During the life-time of the network, and partly in conjunction with it, larger ext...
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)