Morphology in Niger-Congo Languages

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis Creissels
Keyword(s):  
Information Structure ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Verbal Morphology ◽  
Verb Morphology ◽  
Bantu Languages ◽  
Number Marking ◽  
Bantu Language ◽  
Language Groups ◽  
Morphological Patterns

This chapter is an overview of the structure of words belonging to the major lexical categories (nouns and verbs) in Niger-Congo languages, with an emphasis on the morphological patterns typically found in the core Niger-Congo languages commonly considered as relatively conservative in their morphology: rich systems of verb morphology, both inflectional and derivational, and systems of gender-number marking with a relative high number of genders, and no possibility to isolate number marking from gender marking. As regards formal aspects of the structure of words, as a rule, verb forms are morphologically more complex than nominal forms. The highest degree of synthesis is found in the verbal morphology of some Bantu languages. Both prefixes and suffixes are found. Cumulative exponence is typically found in gender-number marking. Multiple exponence is very common in the verbal morphology of Bantu language but rather uncommon in the remainder of Niger-Congo. Consonant alternations are common in several groups of Niger-Congo languages, and various types of tonal alternations play an important role in the morphology of many Niger-Congo languages. The categories most commonly expressed in the inflectional morphology of nouns are gender, number, definiteness, and possession. The inflectional morphology of verbs commonly expresses agreement, TAM, and polarity, and is also widely used to express interclausal dependencies and information structure. As regards word formation, the situation is not uniform across the language groups included in Niger-Congo, but rich systems of verb-to-verb derivation are typically found in the Niger-Congo languages whose morphological patterns are commonly viewed as conservative.

The Linguistic Prehistory of Southern Africa: Bush, Kwadi, Hottentot, and Bantu Linguistic Relationships

Africa ◽  
1963 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 237-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. O. J. Westphal
Keyword(s):  
Southern Africa ◽  
Bantu Languages ◽  
Bantu Language ◽  
Language Groups ◽  
Traditional Language ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Opening Paragraph ◽  
Language Areas ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Opening ParagraphThe languages dealt with in this paper are Bush ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, and ‘D’, Kwadi, Hottentot, and about 20 Bantu language groups, comprising more than 50 distinct dialects. It is concerned with pre-Bantu history and the Bush, Kwadi, and Hottentot languages, but material on Bantu is included for the following reasons: (a) The information relevant to a discussion of the peopling of Southern Africa by Bantu-speaking peoples is scattered in the available literature or is not available at all, and, (b) Bantu traditional lore has something to say on the subject of pre-Bantu indigenous peoples of Southern Africa, and there must therefore be some evaluation of the relationship of modern and early Bantu languages and an attempt must be made to define their recent and early traditional language areas.

Bantu Syntax

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenneke van der Wal
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Verbal Morphology ◽  
Bantu Languages ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Noun Classes ◽  
The Common ◽  
Object Marking ◽  
Do So

This chapter provides an overview of the common syntactic features as well as the syntactic microvariation found in the Bantu languages. It particularly highlights the importance of information structure for the analysis of morphosyntax in this language family: word order, valency, voice, tense-aspect marking, subject and object marking can all be influenced and affected by the information structure expressed in the sentence. The chapter furthermore shows how Bantu languages, despite their shared basic SVO word order, noun classes and extensive verbal morphology, display a remarkable variation in the conditions determining agreement relations and word order. This has influenced syntactic theory formation in the past and should continue to do so now that more data and analyses of Bantu syntactic phenomena become available.

Morphology of Trans New Guinea Languages

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Fedden
Keyword(s):  
Tracking System ◽  
New Guinea ◽  
Expressive Power ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Verb Morphology ◽  
Serial Verb Constructions ◽  
Verb Constructions ◽  
Serial Verb

The aim of this article is to present the morphology and morphosyntax of Trans New Guinea (TNG) languages to a wide audience of linguists. The TNG languages are a family of several hundred languages spoken across much of the New Guinea mainland. The morphology of TNG languages shows a high degree of diversity, from mildly polysynthetic to almost isolating. Language data from virtually all subgroups of TNG can be found here, giving preference to recent descriptions and new data. TNG languages display a clear categorial divide between nouns and verbs. In terms of word formation, they typically allow N-N and V-V compounding. Category-changing derivational processes usually involve overt morphological means. TNG languages are rich in nominalization processes; verbalization processes are less common. Valency-changing derivational processes (causatives, applicatives) are widespread and involve affixation or verb serialization. Many TNG languages have a reduced inventory of verb roots, in extreme cases comprising only as few as 60 recorded roots. Serial verb constructions and light-verb constructions are used to increase the expressive power of the verb lexicon. Besides nouns and verbs, TNG languages have sizable classes of adjectives, small classes of adverbs, and pronouns, directionals, numerals, postpositions, and conjunctions. Nouns have restricted inflectional morphology, with inflection for the possessor being the most widespread. Nominal number is expressed less often and gender is very rare. Peripheral case roles are signaled by postpositions. Many TNG languages show optional ergativity where transitive subjects can be marked by a special case depending on certain semantic or pragmatic factors, such as animacy, agentivity, or focus. Verb morphology is extensive, yielding large paradigms. TNG languages use verbal affixes to express core arguments. Subjects are almost universally indexed with a suffix on the verb. The majority of TNG languages also index the object on the verb, either with a prefix or a suffix. The majority alignment pattern in the clause is accusative. Most TNG languages employ distinct constructions for bodily and mental processes, depending on whether they are controlled by an animate agent (e.g., think) or whether they are manifestations of a stimulus beyond the control of the experiencer (e.g., be angry). Tense, aspect, and mood categories can all be found in TNG languages with one of them usually being dominant. For the expression of aspect, serial verb constructions are common in which the last verb in the serialization has undergone grammaticalization into an aspect marker—for example, a progressive marker which has developed from the verb ‘stay’. In clause chains, almost all TNG languages distinguish between medial and final verbs. Medial verbs morphologically indicate co-reference or disjoint reference of key participants in the discourse, and final verbs provide morphosemantic information like tense, mood, or illocutionary force, which typically applies to the whole clause chain. Since this type of tracking system of continuity in discourse is highly characteristic of TNG in general and less common worldwide, it is treated in more detail here.

scholarly journals ARIES: A lexical platform for engineering Spanish processing tools

1997 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 317-345 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOSÉ M. GOÑI ◽  
JOSÉ C. GONZÁLEZ ◽  
ANTONIO MORENO
Keyword(s):  
Word Formation ◽  
Spanish Language ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Type Checking ◽  
Efficient Retrieval ◽  
Software Interfaces ◽  
Feature Based ◽  
Run Time ◽  
E Mail ◽  
Unification Grammar

We present a lexical platform that has been developed for the Spanish language. It achieves portability between different computer systems and efficiency, in terms of speed and lexical coverage. A model for the full treatment of Spanish inflectional morphology for verbs, nouns and adjectives is presented. This model permits word formation based solely on morpheme concatenation, driven by a feature-based unification grammar. The run-time lexicon is a collection of allomorphs for both stems and endings. Although not tested, it should be suitable also for other Romance and highly inflected languages. A formalism is also described for encoding a lemma-based lexical source, well suited for expressing linguistic generalizations: inheritance classes, lemma encoding, morpho-graphemic allomorphy rules and limited type-checking. From this source base, we can automatically generate an allomorph indexed dictionary adequate for efficient retrieval and processing. A set of software tools has been implemented around this formalism: lexical base augmenting aids, lexical compilers to build run-time dictionaries and access libraries for them, feature manipulation libraries, unification and pseudo-unification modules, morphological processors, a parsing system, etc. Software interfaces among the different modules and tools are cleanly defined to ease software integration and tool combination in a flexible way. Directions for accessing our e-mail and web demonstration prototypes are also provided. Some figures are given, showing the lexical coverage of our platform compared to some popular spelling checkers.

scholarly journals Germanising Oshiwambo language

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 26-40
Author(s):  
Johannes Uushona ◽  
Petrus Mbenzi
Keyword(s):  
Daily Life ◽  
Higher Learning ◽  
Linguistic Study ◽  
Bantu Languages ◽  
Languages In Contact ◽  
European Languages ◽  
Bantu Language ◽  
Institutions Of Higher Learning ◽  
Phonological Rules

Oshiwambo, a Bantu language spoken in Northern Namibia and Southern Angola, like other languages in contact, has adopted foreign words from other languages to meet the needs of its daily life vocabularies and activities. This paper identified and described the phonological changes which the loanwords from German go through to fit into Oshiwambo speech system and established the phonological rules that account for these changes. The paper is based on the hypothesis that words borrowed from other languages, especially European languages, into Oshiwambo, are phonologically modified to fit the Oshiwambo speech system because little information is available on the phonological wambonisation of German words. The data were collected from school textbooks, daily conversations and personal vocabularies of the researcher. The loanwords were transcribed for phonological analysis. The paper investigated how Oshiwambo borrowed words from German yet the two languages differ widely in terms of phonemic inventories and phonotactics. It has become evident that there are several vowel and consonant changes in the process of borrowing. The paper contributes to the linguistic study in the area of Oshiwambo in particular and Bantu languages in general. The knowledge acquired could be utilized by the institutions of higher learning too.

scholarly journals On the aspectual system of Wushi (Babessi), a Ring Grassfields Bantu language of Cameroon

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-65
Author(s):  
Liliane Hodieb
Keyword(s):  
Multiple Time ◽  
Bantu Languages ◽  
Bantu Language ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Grassfields Bantu ◽  
Past Tenses

One of the characteristics of Bantu languages, including Grassfields Bantu languages, is their multiple time distinctions. Within the Ring Grassfields group, multiple tenses are also well attested. For example, Aghem has three past and two future tenses (Anderson 1979), Babanki has four past tenses and three future tenses (Akumbu & Fogwe 2012), as well as Lamnso’ (Yuka 2012). Oku has three past tenses and two future tenses (Nforbi 1993) and Babungo has four past and two future tenses (Schaub 1985). These tenses represent different degrees of remoteness in time such as hordienal, immediate, distant, etc. However, in spite of the indisputable lexical unity of Ring Grassfields Bantu languages (Stallcup 1980; Piron 1997), Wushi strikingly stands apart: it does not mark tense morphologically. As a matter of fact, the aspectual system of Wushi is based on five aspects: perfective, imperfective, retrospective or anterior, potential, and the distal or dissociative marker kə̀ that is analyzed in the light of Botne & Kershner (2008). This paper sets out to analyze these verb forms.

scholarly journals Questions in Bantu languages: prosodies and positions

2011 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 182
Author(s):  
Laura J. Downing
Keyword(s):  
Doctoral Student ◽  
Project Leader ◽  
Research Teams ◽  
Bantu Languages ◽  
Bantu Language ◽  
Formal Syntax ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Cooperative Project

The papers in this volume were originally presented at the Workshop on Bantu Wh-questions, held at the Institut des Sciences de l’Homme, Université Lyon 2, on 25-26 March 2011, which was organized by the French-German cooperative project on the Phonology/Syntax Interface in Bantu Languages (BANTU PSYN). This project, which is funded by the ANR and the DFG, comprises three research teams, based in Berlin, Paris and Lyon. The Berlin team, at the ZAS, is: Laura Downing (project leader) and Kristina Riedel (post-doc). The Paris team, at the Laboratoire de phonétique et phonologie (LPP; UMR 7018), is: Annie Rialland (project leader), Cédric Patin (Maître de Conférences, STL, Université Lille 3), Jean-Marc Beltzung (post-doc), Martial Embanga Aborobongui (doctoral student), Fatima Hamlaoui (post-doc). The Lyon team, at the Dynamique du Langage (UMR 5596) is: Gérard Philippson (project leader) and Sophie Manus (Maître de Conférences, Université Lyon 2). These three research teams bring together the range of theoretical expertise necessary to investigate the phonology-syntax interface: intonation (Patin, Rialland), tonal phonology (Aborobongui, Downing, Manus, Patin, Philippson, Rialland), phonology-syntax interface (Downing, Patin) and formal syntax (Riedel, Hamlaoui). They also bring together a range of Bantu language expertise: Western Bantu (Aboronbongui, Rialland), Eastern Bantu (Manus, Patin, Philippson, Riedel), and Southern Bantu (Downing).  

Grammar and Lexis

2019 ◽  
pp. 19-226
Author(s):  
Howard Jones ◽  
Martin H. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Word Formation ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Cd Rom

This chapter has four sections, ‘Sounds and spelling’ (i.e. phonology and orthography), ‘Inflectional morphology’, ‘Syntax’, and ‘Lexis’ (the last of these covers word formation, borrowing, and vocabulary with meanings peculiar to the period such as dienest, êre, minne, ritter, vrouwe). In each section there is a summary of the main points, followed by detailed advanced paragraphs. The summaries serve as a stand-alone introductory grammar designed to help readers gain a reading knowledge of MHG as quickly as possible, which they can try out on the two introductory texts in Chapter 5. The detailed paragraphs can be used for reference or to gain an overview of particular areas of the language, and include extensive cross references to and from the texts in Chapter 5. The chapter concludes with an overview of the MHG dictionaries that are available on the Internet, in print, and on CD-ROM.

Morphological Theory and Creole Languages

2018 ◽  
pp. 454-475
Author(s):  
Ana Luís
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Morphological Evidence ◽  
Word Structure ◽  
Morphological Theory ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Creole Languages ◽  
Morphological Patterns

This chapter explores the interaction between creole morphology and morphological theory by drawing on empirical evidence which illustrates that morphological similarities exist between creoles and non-creoles. Such evidence shows that morphological patterns in creoles may be used for the creation of new lexemes (through word-formation), that morphosyntactic features may be mapped onto existing lexemes (by means of inflection), or that derived words in creoles may be semantically non-compositional while inflected words may exhibit form–meaning mismatches and be part of non-predictable paradigms. Conceptually, the morphological evidence will be used to claim that creole word structure is just as principled as the morphology of non-creole languages, and that it can be naturally accounted for by applying the same formal apparatus that is used for the analysis of non-creole languages.

scholarly journals Inversion effects on mental arithmetic in English- and Polish-speaking adults

2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-103
Author(s):  
Carolin Annette Lewis ◽  
Julia Bahnmueller ◽  
Marta Wesierska ◽  
Korbinian Moeller ◽  
Silke Melanie Göbel
Keyword(s):  
Mental Arithmetic ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Place Value ◽  
Number Word ◽  
Problem Size ◽  
Number Range ◽  
Number Words ◽  
Language Groups ◽  
Addition Problem ◽  
The Cost

In some languages the order of tens and units in number words is inverted compared with the symbolic digital notation (e.g., German 23 → “ dreiundzwanzig,” literally: “ three-and-twenty”). In other languages only teen-numbers are inverted (e.g., English 17 → “ seventeen”; Polish 17 → “ siedemnaście” literally “ seventeen”). Previous studies have focused on between group comparisons of inverted and non-inverted languages and showed that number word inversion impairs performance on basic numerical tasks and arithmetic. In two independent experiments, we investigated whether number word inversion affects addition performance within otherwise non-inverted languages (Exp. 1: English, Exp. 2: Polish). In particular, we focused on the influence of inverted ( I; English: teen-numbers ⩾ 13, Polish: numbers 11–19) and non-inverted ( N) summands with sums between 13 and 39. Accordingly, three categories of addition problems were created: N + N, N + I, and I + I with problem size matched across categories. Across both language groups, we observed that problems with results in the 20 and 30 number range were responded to faster when only non-inverted summands were part of the problems as opposed to problems with one or two inverted summands. In line with this, the cost of a carry procedure was the largest for two inverted summands. The results support the notion that both language-specific and language-invariant aspects contribute to addition problem-solving. In particular though, regarding language-specific aspects, the results indicate that inverted number word formation of teens influences place-value processing of Arabic digits even in otherwise non-inverted languages.

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