Interaction of verbal categories in Gban and a method for describing language-specific hierarchies of interacting categories (original) (raw)
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Grammatical Categories and Translatability across Languages
Arts: The Journal of the Sydney University Arts Association, 2012
This talk: is, like many, autobiographical in origin. It grew out of my experience in study and learning an exotic language of New Guinea, Yimas, spoken by about 200 people in a village of the same name in the East Sepik Province. Yimas is a language of a type as far away as could be imagined from my native language English and the other familiar languages of western Europe. To illustrate briefly, Yimas can often express in a single word what would correspond to a sentence in English:(1) ampa-pay-ma-taI]-wura-na-UI) me to you-first- ...
A Study of Category Shift in Nigerian English
Language changes over time, and one of the numerous ways in which this change takes place is through the process of category shift. Category shift in word classes is a process in which a word that originally belonged to a particular word class gradually begins to be used as another word class. This process occurs naturally enough among native speakers of English. But in second language situations such as Nigeria, the process often violates some constraints and yields unacceptable results. In this paper, we have attempted an investigation of category shift in word classes in Nigerian English. Our findings are: (a) that there are indeed numerous instances of category shift that are peculiarly Nigerian; (b) that the majority of instances involve shifts from the noun and the adjective classes to the verb class; and (c) that while some are acceptable as standard usage, others are not, because of certain linguistic constraints.
Once more on linguistic categories
Helmbrecht et al. (eds.), Form and function in language research. Papers in honour of Christian Lehmann. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin / New York, 2009: 151-157., 2009
A long-standing assumption in linguistic analysis is that different languages and constructions can be described in terms of the same grammatical categories and relations. Individual grammatical categories and relations are in fact often assumed to be universal. Grammatical categories and relations display however different properties across different languages and constructions, which challenges the idea that the same categories and relations should actually be posited in each case. These facts have been dealt with in two major ways in the functional-typological literature. In a widespread approach, the same categories and relations are posited for different languages and constructions provided that they all have categories and relations that display some selected properties. In a more recent approach, this idea is abandoned, and grammatical categories and relations are argued to be language-specific and construction-specific. The paper provides a critical review of these approaches, and a comparison is made with some generatively oriented approaches. In particular, it is argued that a distinction should be made between two views of grammatical categories and relations. In one view, grammatical categories and relations are classificatory labels indicating that a variety of linguistic elements display some selected property. In another view, grammatical categories and relations are proper components of a speaker's mental grammar. While cross-linguistically valid (or possibly universal) and cross-constructionally valid categories and relations can be posited when classifying linguistic elements based on observed grammatical patterns, there is no obvious evidence that such categories and relations exist at the level of mental representation. This is however because of the absence of conclusive evidence about the organization of a speaker's mental grammar, rather than because of the linguistic evidence as such.
Lexical categories in African languages: The case of adjectives word-class in Nyakyusa
An endeavor to establish typical lexical categories in individual languages as well as a typology of word-classes yields contradictory conclusions. In this paper we provide evidence to substantiate the existence of an independent and indispensable open category of adjectives in the Bantu language Nyakyusa. An argument that Bantu languages possess a closed class of adjectives (Dixon 1982; Rugemalira 2008; Segerer 2008) is called to question by the large number of adjectives in Nyakyusa, which provide almost all Dixon's core semantic types. In addition, adjectivization permits establishment of a vast number of adjectives which designate various property-concepts in the language. Such derived adjectives fit well the Dixon's semantic types.