A Grammar of Tommo So

A Grammar of Tommo So
Author: Laura McPherson
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 648
Release: 2013-10-29
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110301075

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Tommo So is a Dogon language with approximately 60,000 speakers in Mali, West Africa. As only the second full grammatical description of a Dogon language, this volume is a critical resource for solving the mystery of Dogon's genetic affiliation with other languages in Africa. Tommo So is an SOV language with isolating nominal morphology and agglutinative verbal morphology; suffixes on the verb mark tense/aspect/negation as well as subject agreement. The phonology is sensitive to levels of verbal morphology in that variable vowel harmony applies less frequently as one moves to outer layers of the morphology. The tone system of Tommo So is of typological interest in both its phonological and syntactic instantiations. Phonologically, it is a two-tone system of H and L, but these specified tones contrast with a surface-underspecified tone. Grammatically, the lexical tone of a word is often overwritten by syntactically-induced overlays. For example, an inalienable noun's tone will be replaced with L if it is possessed by a non-pronominal possessor, and by either H or HL if the possessor is pronominal. The language has also innovated a series of locative quasi-verbs and focus particles sensitive to pragmatic factors like certainty.

A Grammar of Seenku

A Grammar of Seenku
Author: Laura McPherson
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 592
Release: 2021-11-21
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110765020

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Seenku is a Western Mande language of the Samogo group spoken in southwestern Burkina Faso by approximately 17,000 speakers. It has undergone a lot of phonological reduction, leading to a rich segmental and tonal phoneme inventory but mainly mono- and sesquisyllabic roots. The language has four contrastive levels of tone that combine to create over a dozen contours. Tone has a high functional load lexically and grammatically, permeating all aspects of grammar. Most verbs have two stem forms: a realis form and an irrealis form. The realis is derived from the irrealis by infixing a high vowel before the stem vowel, creating a diphthong. The use of a particular stem form is determined by aspect and construction type, but most other morphosyntactic meanings (e.g. progressive aspect or causative) are expressed analytically. Like most Mande languages, Seenku has an S Aux O V X word order in addition to areal clause-final negation. It displays a reduced set of post-subject “predicate markers” compared to other Mande languages, and those that are attested are variably realized only by tone changes and lengthening on the subject itself.

Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 1153
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 0192561480

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A Grammar of Jamsay

A Grammar of Jamsay
Author: Jeffrey Heath
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 761
Release: 2008-08-27
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110207222

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Jamsay is the largest-population language among some twenty Dogon languages in Mali, West Africa. This is the first comprehensive grammar of any Dogon language, including a full tonology. The language is verb-final, with subject agreement on the verb and with no other case-marking. Its most striking feature is the morphosyntactically triggered use of stem-wide tone-contour overlays on nouns, verbs, and adjectives. All stems have a lexical tone contour such as H[igh], L[ow]-H, HL, or LHL with at least one H-tone. An exam of tone overlay is tone-dropping to stem-wide all-L. This is used for Perfective verbs (in the presence of a focalized constituent), and for a noun or adjective before an adjective. It is also used to mark the head NP in a relative clause (the head NP is not extracted, so this is the only direct indication of head NP status). The verb in a relative clause is morphologically a participle, agreeing with the head NP in humanness and number, rather than with the subject. "Intonation" is used grammatically. For example, NP conjunction 'X and Y' is expressed as X Y, without a conjunction, but with "dying-quail" intonation on both conjuncts.

Creole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches

Creole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches
Author: Peter Bakker
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2017-05-31
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027265739

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This book launches a new approach to creole studies founded on phylogenetic network analysis. Phylogenetic approaches offer new visualisation techniques and insights into the relationships between creoles and non-creoles, creoles and other contact varieties, and between creoles and lexifier languages. With evidence from creole languages in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific, the book provides new perspectives on creole typology, cross-creole comparisons, and creole semantics. The book offers an introduction for newcomers to the fields of creole studies and phylogenetic analysis. Using these methods to analyse a variety of linguistic features, both structural and semantic, the book then turns to explore old and new questions and problems in creole studies. Original case studies explore the differences and similarities between creoles, and propose solutions to the problems of how to classify creoles and how they formed and developed. The book provides a fascinating glimpse into the unity and heterogeneity of creoles and the areal influences on their development. It also provides metalinguistic discussions of the “creole” concept from different perspectives. Finally, the book reflects critically on the findings and methods, and sets new agendas for future studies. Creole Studies has been written for a broad readership of scholars and students in the fields of contact linguistics, biolinguistics, sociolinguistics, language typology, and semantics.

The Languages and Linguistics of Africa

The Languages and Linguistics of Africa
Author: Tom Güldemann
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 1032
Release: 2018-09-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110421666

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This innovative handbook takes a fresh look at the currently underestimated linguistic diversity of Africa, the continent with the largest number of languages in the world. It covers the major domains of linguistics, offering both a representative picture of Africa’s linguistic landscape as well as new and at times unconventional perspectives. The focus is not so much on exhaustiveness as on the fruitful relationship between African and general linguistics and the contributions the two domains can make to each other. This volume is thus intended for readers with a specific interest in African languages and also for students and scholars within the greater discipline of linguistics.

The Typological Diversity of Morphomes

The Typological Diversity of Morphomes
Author: Borja Herce
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2023-03-30
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0192679856

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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This is the first typologically-oriented book-length treatment of morphomes, systematic morphological identities, usually within inflectional paradigms, that do not map onto syntactic or semantic natural classes. In the first half of the book, Borja Herce outlines the theoretical and empirical challenges associated with the identification and definition of morphomes, and surveys their links with related notions such as syncretism, homophony, segmentation, and economy, among others. He also presents the different ways in which morphomic structures in a language have been observed to emerge, change, and disappear. The second part of the book contains its core contribution: a database of 120 morphomes across 79 languages from a range of families, which are presented and analysed in detail. A range of findings emerge as a result, including the idiosyncratic nature of morphomes in the Romance languages, the existence of cross-linguistically recurrent unnatural patterns, and the preference for more natural structures even among morphomes. The database also allows further explorations of other issues such as the effect of learnability and communicative efficiency on morphological structures, and the lexical and grammatical informativity of morphs and their distribution.

Prosody and Prosodic Interfaces

Prosody and Prosodic Interfaces
Author: Haruo Kubozono
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 577
Release: 2022
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0198869746

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"This volume brings together novel, original studies on prosody and prosodic interfaces. It consists of fifteen chapters, some of which look at word prosody and phrase prosody in individual languages, some examine the interactions between lexical tones and intonation, and others analyze the syntax-prosody interface. Despite much recent attention paid to prosody, there is yet a significant number of languages and dialects that remain largely undocumented or understudied. Many chapters in this volume contribute to this empirical gap in prosodic research by presenting new data, based on original fieldwork and experiments. Moreover, many chapters address important questions pertaining to the interactions between lexical and postlexical tones with in-depth investigations of both lexical prosody and postlexical phonology. Furthermore, other chapters tackle the question of how prosodic structure-either lexical or postlexical-interacts with syntactic structure, thereby contributing to our understanding of the interaction between multiple components of the grammar, embedded in a thorough understanding of current linguistic theories. The volume as a whole addresses many difficult issues and illuminates the question of how prosody is structured in language and functions in human communication"--

Replacive Grammatical Tone in the Dogon Languages

Replacive Grammatical Tone in the Dogon Languages
Author: Laura Elizabeth McPherson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2014
Genre:
ISBN:

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This dissertation focuses on replacive grammatical tone in the Dogon languages of Mali, where a word's lexical tone is replaced with a tonal overlay in specific morphosyntactic contexts. Unlike more typologically common systems of replacive tone, where overlays are triggered by morphemes or morphological features and are confined to a single word, Dogon overlays in the DP may span multiple words and are triggered by other words in the phrase. DP elements are divided into two categories: controllers (those elements that trigger tonal overlays) and non-controllers (those elements that impose no tonal demands on surrounding words). I show that controller status and the phonological content of the associated tonal overlay is dependent on syntactic category. Further, I show that a controller can only impose its overlay on words that it c-commands, or itself. I argue that the sensitivity to specific details of syntactic category and structure indicate that Dogon replacive tone is not synchronically a phonological system, though its origins almost certainly lie in regular phrasal phonology. Drawing on inspiration from Construction Morphology, I develop a morphological framework in which morphology is defined as the idiosyncratic mapping of phonological, syntactic, and semantic information, explicitly learned by speakers in the form of a construction. The same constructional format can be used for both word-level and phrase-level phenomena. Under this view, Dogon replacive tone is idiosyncratic phonology (tonal overlays) associated with syntactic structure (category and c-command). A key feature of the Dogon system of grammatical tone is that when two or more controllers target the same word(s), conflicts can arise, with each constructional schema demanding different output forms. I argue that morphological constructions act as constraints on output form, and cases of competition are resolved through constraint interaction. I further show that the cyclic spell-out of syntactic structure can block the application of overlays, but that this blocking is a language-specific parameter, suggesting violable constraints protecting the morphophonological form of phases. In most cases, strict ranking (as in Optimality Theory) is sufficient to account for the data, but in two languages, Tommo So and Nanga, even nonstochastic patterns require constraint ganging, indicating the need for weighted constraints. I couch the analyses of Tommo So and nine other Dogon languages in Maximum Entropy Grammar, a stochastic version of Harmonic Grammar that can account for both constraint ganging and for surface variation. I show that the same constraint set, suitably weighted, is able to capture eight of the ten languages. The other two languages, Tiranige and Togo Kan, have followed different diachronic paths and require different constraints but still fit into the constructional framework. The framework developed in this dissertation seeks to explain how restructured phrasal phonological systems are learned and implemented. I show how predictions of the model regarding the nature of the trigger, target domain, and resolution of conflicts are upheld by other phenomena outside of the Dogon language family.

A Grammar of Bangime

A Grammar of Bangime
Author: Jeffrey Heath
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2018-03-19
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110765217

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Spoken only in a cul-de-sac valley in Dogon country in east-central Mali, Bangime is the most enigmatic language isolate in the whole of interior West Africa. It is apparently a Basque-like survival of a formerly widespread language family, now boxed into this small valley by the expansion of Niger-Congo languages (Dogon, Bozo, Mande) on all sides. This book brings out the full glory of its grammar, especially its 3-level tone system.