The Majang Language (original) (raw)
Related papers
On the verbal system in Langi a Bantu language of Tanzania (F. 33)
Computer Systems: Science & Engineering, 2005
This paper presents the Langi verbal system and the various ways in which tense, aspect and mood are encoded. Through the description of the structures and uses of the various forms, it attempts to demonstrate how the different conjugations fit together to form a coherent whole, morphologically and semantically, and how in some cases the system has been influenced by surrounding Cushitic languages. RESUME Cet article présente le système verbal du langi et les différents moyens mis en oeuvre pour encoder le temps, l'aspect et le mode. A travers la description des structures et emplois des diverses formes, il tente de démontrer comment les conjugaisons diverses forment un système cohérent, sur les plans morphologiques et sémantiques, et comment, dans certains cas, le système a été influencé par les langues couchitiques environnantes. * I thank the following for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper: Christiane Paulian, Zlatka Guentchéva, Denis Creissels, Dave Odden and an anonymous reviewer at SAL. I am also indebted to Derek Nurse and Maarten Mous for pointing out (as well as providing) various articles of interest for this study. 2 This language is relatively unknown to linguistics: when I began studying it in 1996, the only published work dated from 1916 (by Otto Dempwolff). The data presented here is all first hand, and was gathered during fieldwork I carried out in Tanzania during my doctoral studies, the funding for which was provided by the LACITO-CNRS. Oliver Stegen of SIL has started working on the language recently; so far he has presented a paper on the vowel system at CALL (Leiden) in 2000, and has published a paper on derivation (2002). A monograph on Langi is in press: Dunham (forthcoming).
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):
Grammars and Sketches of the World's Languages Africa
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),
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)
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.
Nominal tonology and spreading rules in Tagbana (Fròʔò dialect)
Studies in African linguistics, 2021
This article investigates nominal tonology of Tagbana, a Senufo language of Côte d'Ivoire. The contribution is twofold: first, it concerns the whole tonal system, including lexical tones and sandhi tone rules, and second it relates the tonal system to the prosodic hierarchy. Tagbana has three level tones (L, M, H) and two floating tones (H) and (L). A mid tone (M) at the end of a noun is always followed by a floating tone (either H or L) that might be a historic trace left by the tone of a Class Marker. Active sandhi tonal rules are called 'Mid Replacement' (RepM), 'Low Raising' (RaisL), 'Spreading of L' (SprL) & 'Spreading of H' (SprH). The domains of the sandhi tonal rules include the Minimal Prosodic Word (root + class marker), the Intermediate and Maximal Prosodic Words (nominal and adjectival compounds), the Prosodic Phrases (particularly in object + verb constructions), and the Intonational Phrase. From the Minimal Prosodic Word on, it was found that a larger number of tonal sandhi processes apply in smaller prosodic domains, and that the higher the prosodic domain, the fewer processes are active.
HETEROSEMY OF CASE MARKERS AND CLAUSE-LINKERS IN ANDAANDI (NILE NUBIAN)
Case markers are usually associated with nouns or noun phrases but, as shown in cross-linguistic study on "versatile cases", case markers are also used as clause-linkers in a wide range of genetically diverse languages. However, African languages are not found in Aikhenvald's sample. Our paper shows that in some subgroups of Nilo-Saharan and Afro-Asiatic case markers are, in fact, attested on subordinate clauses.
2019
This paper provides an overview of lexical and clausal nominalization in Esahie, a relatively underdescribed and undocumented Kwa language. We show that in Esahie, lexical nominalizations lose all verbal properties whilst clausal nominalizations retain certain verbal features. Overall, nominalization in Esahie is typically a case of lexical rather than clausal nominalization. Lexical nominalizations in Esahie may take the form of simple affixation, parasynthesis or compounding. We also provide further empirical support against Aronoff’s (1976) Unitary Base Hypothesis and show that certain inflectional operators in Esahie belong to the group of word-class-changing inflectional markers (cf. Haspelmath 1996; Bauer 2004). Data used in this work emanates from a series of fieldworks conducted in the Western-North region of Ghana, and the argumentation approach adopted is descriptive.