Number in Eastern Dan (original) (raw)
Related papers
Esquisse de grammaire du dan de l'Est (dialecte de Gouèta)
Mandenkan, 2021
L'esquisse de grammaire comporte les informations de base sur la phonologie et le morphosyntaxe du dan de l'Est. Dans la partie phonologique, les systèmes cosonantiques et vocaliques sont analysés, de même que le système tonal et les pieds caractéristiques. Les parties de discours du dan sont inventoriées, et chaque classe de lexèmes est analysé du point de vue de ses particularités morphosyntaxiques : les noms, les noms locatifs (avec leur système de déclinaison), les pronoms personnels, les marques prédicatives, les adjectifs, les verbes, les adverbes, les numéros, les déterminants, les pospositions. Les constructions nominales et les types d'énoncés non-verbaux sont traités dans la section syntaxique (la syntaxe de la proposition complexe n'est pas abordée)
1. Vydrin, Valentin. Non-verbal predication and copulas in three Mande languages
Journal of West African Languages, 2020
Non-verbal predication and copula types are analysed in three Mande languages: Bambara, Guinean Maninka, and Eastern Dan. These languages display considerable divergences. In Bambara, there are three affirmative non-verbal copulas used in different construction types, comprising one formal class. In Guinean Maninka, there is only one non-verbal affirmative copula, and it can be omitted; there is a tendency toward its substitution with a focalization particle. The affirmative non-verbal qualitative construction is copulaless. In both these languages, there is also a verbal copula used in non-default context, and an ostentative copula going back to a verb whose lexical meaning is 'to look'. In Eastern Dan, copulas are diverse in nature: some are of verbal origin, while others go back to demonstrative adverbs. There are three series of inflectional auxiliary lexemes which are used both in verbal constructions and in constructions with non-verbal predicates, i.e. as copulas.
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.
Language Documentation & Conservation, 2020
Whether tone should be represented in writing, and if so how much, is one of the most formidable challenges facing those developing orthographies for tone languages. Various researchers have attempted to quantify the level of written ambiguity in a language if tone is not marked, but these contributions are not easily comparable because they use different measurement criteria. This article presents a first attempt to develop a standardized instrument and evaluate its potential. The method is exemplified using four narrative texts translated into Elip, Mbelime, and Eastern Dan. It lists all distinct written word forms that are homographs if tone is not marked, discarding repeated words, homophony, and polysemy, as well as pairs that never share the same syntactic slot. It treats lexical and grammatical tone separately, while acknowledging that these two functions often coincide. The results show that the level of written ambiguity in Elip is weighted towards the grammar, while in Mbe...
Deverbal and deadjectival nominalization in Dan: Not as different as one might think. A reply to Baker & Gondo (2020), 2021
The paper (Baker & Gondo 2020) studies several issues in Dan morphosyntax: the formal differences between verbs, nouns and adjectives; two types of possessive constructions (with alienable and inalienable head nouns) and their syntactic structures; the derivation of nouns from verbs and adjectives; low and high nominalization; and possessive constructions with deverbal and deadjectival nouns. As it turns out, Baker & Gondo's analyses are incorrect in some major points: the key formal differences between verbs, adjectives and nouns have been left unnoticed due to disregard for Dan tonal morphology, and for the same reason, the tonal marking of the high nominalization has also been ignored. Baker & Gondo's syntactic analysis of the possessive construction with alienable nouns as analogous to the Saxon genitive (king's house) cannot be accepted; in fact, it can be compared with the genitive construction seen in English the house of the king. Possessive constructions with deverbal and deadjectival nouns are not as radically opposed as one may think after reading Baker & Gondo's paper; in fact, a noun derived from an intransitive verb can sometimes appear as an alienable noun with respect to its theme, and, conversely, a deadjectival noun can appear as a relational noun with respect to the modified noun.