scholarly journals Encoding focus in Kanuri verbal morphology: predication focus and the "Kanuri focus shift"

2006 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 185-209
Author(s):  
H. Ekkehard Wolff ◽  
Doris Löhr
Keyword(s):  
Verbal Morphology ◽  
Perfective Aspect ◽  
Verb Morphology ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Focus Marking ◽  
First Time ◽  
Focus Theory

Focus on verbal operators such as aspect or tense ("predication focus", lucidly described by Hyman & Watters (1984) under the label "auxiliary focus") has been noticed to exist in African languages of Afroasiatic and Niger-Congo affiliation, but not so far in Saharan. The Saharan language Kanuri is assumed to have substantially reorganized its TAM system, particularly in the perfective aspect domain (Cyffer [2006] dates major changes between the years 1820 and 1900). The paper discusses, for the first time in Kanuri scholarship, the existence of a neat subsystem of predication focus marking by suffix in the perfective aspect which is made up of a total of six conjugational paradigms that uniformly encode predication focus by suffix {-ò}. Kanuri dialects differ in strategies and scope of focus marking encoded in verb morphology. In the light of data from the Yerwa (Nigeria) and Manga (Niger) dialects the paper discusses some "anomalies" with regard to general focus theory which we account for by describing the "Kanuri Focus Shift" as a diachronic process which is responsible for leftward displacement of scope of focus.  

Bilingual children as “laboratories” for studying contact outcomes: Development of perfective aspect

Linguistics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 693-723 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pui Yiu Szeto ◽  
Stephen Matthews ◽  
Virginia Yip
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Ecological Approach ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Verbal Morphology ◽  
Perfective Aspect ◽  
Contact Linguistics ◽  
English Bilingual ◽  
Aspect Markers ◽  
Conceptual Link ◽  
Language Transmission

Abstract This paper examines the close parallels between the contact phenomena in Cantonese-English bilingual children and Southeast Asian creoles, especially in the domain of perfective aspect marking. ‘Already’ is a cross-linguistically common lexical source of perfective aspect markers given its conceptual link with the sense of perfectivity. In contact scenarios involving a European lexifier and Southeast Asian substrates, the development of ‘already’ into a perfective marker is further triggered by the incompatibility between the verbal morphology of the former and the isolating typology of the latter. Adopting an ecological approach to language transmission and creole genesis we discuss how the transient grammaticalization phenomena in the bilingual children can be compared to decreolization, and how the study of bilingual acquisition can contribute to contact linguistics. Despite the prevalence of unpredictable factors in contact scenarios, we argue that bilingual children can still serve as powerful “laboratories” for studying contact outcomes at the communal level.

West African Languages Congress

1963 ◽  
Vol 6 (03) ◽  
pp. 30-31
Author(s):  
Joseph Greenberg
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
The United States ◽  
West African ◽  
Financial Assistance ◽  
The Other ◽  
Substantial Portion ◽  
The West ◽  
African Languages ◽  
The Third ◽  
First Time

The Third West African Languages Congress took place in Freetown, Sierra Leone, from March 26 to April 1, 1963. This was the third of the annual meetings of those interested in West African languages sponsored by the West African Languages Survey, previous meetings having been held in Accra (1961) and Dakar (1962). The West African Languages Survey is a Ford Foundation project. Additional financial assistance from UNESCO and other sources contributed materially to the scope and success of the meeting. This meeting was larger than previous ones both in attendance and in number of papers presented and, it may be said, in regard to the scientific level of the papers presented. The official participants, seventy-two in number, came from virtually every country in West Africa, from Western European countries and from the United States. The linguistic theme of the meeting was the syntax of West African languages, and a substantial portion of the papers presented were on this topic. In addition, there was for the first time at these meetings a symposium on the teaching of English, French and African languages in Africa. The papers of this symposium will be published in the forthcoming series of monographs planned as a supplement to the new Journal of West African Languages. The other papers are to appear in the Journal of African Languages edited by Jack Berry of the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Visual Crowding and the tone orthography of African languages

2009 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Reading Process ◽  
African Languages ◽  
General Recognition ◽  
Clinical Conditions ◽  
First Time ◽  
Visual Crowding ◽  
And Linguistics

The effect of Crowding has long been recognised by cognitive psychologists engaged in examining the reading process. Yet it is not generally taken into account by most field linguists involved in the development of tone orthographies for emerging African languages. True, there is a general recognition that diacritic overload is unhelpful, but this has never been articulated with the help of the more precise terminology already on offer from the field of cognitive psychology. Using an experimental tone orthography developed for Kabiye (Gur, Togo) as an example, I postulate that an exhaustive representation of tone by means of accents will trigger Crowding. This is a hypothesis that has yet to be tested under clinical conditions. But the aim of this article is to call the phenomenon by its name for the first time and thereby stimulate further research. I also hope to demonstrate by means of this single example the gulf that exists between cognitive psychology and linguistics. Once we recognise that the gulf exists, we can begin to build bridges.

Intensive Contact and the Copying of Paradigms: An Éven Dialect in Contact with Sakha (Yakut)

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brigitte Pakendorf
Keyword(s):  
Vital Role ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
Verbal Morphology ◽  
Linguistic Identity ◽  
Verb Morphology ◽  
Unique Structure ◽  
Northeastern Siberia ◽  
Heated Debate ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Village

AbstractThe development of the unique structure of Copper Island Aleut, which displays a combination of Russian finite verb morphology and Aleut nominal and non-finite verbal morphology as well as lexicon has been the subject of heated debate. In the absence of other examples of similar inflectional paradigm copying, the processes leading to this development are hard to elucidate. This paper discusses examples of paradigms copied from the Siberian Turkic language Sakha (Yakut) into a dialect of the Northern Tungusic language Éven spoken in the village of Sebjan-Küöl in northeastern Siberia. These data demonstrate that paradigm copying can take place in a situation of widespread bilingualism, with code-switching playing a vital role. Furthermore, they provide evidence that such mixed forms have the potential of serving as conduits for further copying of grammatical forms, and that they play an important role in the linguistic identity of the speakers, as has been suggested previously for mixed languages such as Copper Island Aleut.

Focus, exhaustivity and existence in Akan, Ga and Ngamo

Linguistics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 221-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mira Grubic ◽  
Agata Renans ◽  
Reginald Akuoko Duah
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Academic Press ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Information Focus ◽  
Focus Marking ◽  
Crosslinguistic Variation ◽  
Background Construction ◽  
Focus Strategies

Abstract This paper discusses the relation between focus marking and focus interpretation in Akan (Kwa), Ga (Kwa), and Ngamo (West Chadic). In all three languages, there is a special morphosyntactically marked focus/background construction, as well as morphosyntactically unmarked focus. We present data stemming from original fieldwork investigating whether marked focus/background constructions in these three languages also have additional interpretative effects apart from standard focus interpretation. Crosslinguistically, different additional inferences have been found for marked focus constructions, e.g. contrast (e.g. Vallduví, Enric & Maria Vilkuna. 1997. On rheme and kontrast. In Peter Culicover & Louise McNally (eds.), The limits of syntax (Syntax and semantics 29), 79–108. New York: Academic Press; Hartmann, Katharina & Malte Zimmermann. 2007b. In place – Out of place: Focus in Hausa. In Kerstin Schwabe & Susanne Winkler (eds.), On information structure, meaning and form, 365–403. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.; Destruel, Emilie & Leah Velleman. 2014. Refining contrast: Empirical evidence from the English it-cleft. In Christopher Piñón (ed.), Empirical issues in syntax and semantics 10, 197–214. Paris: Colloque de syntaxe et sémantique à Paris (CSSP). http://www.cssp.cnrs.fr/eiss10/), exhaustivity (e.g. É. Kiss, Katalin. 1998. Identificational focus versus information focus. Language 74(2). 245–273.; Hartmann, Katharina & Malte Zimmermann. 2007a. Exhaustivity marking in Hausa: A re-evaluation of the particle nee/cee. In Enoch O. Aboh, Katharina Hartmann & Malte Zimmermann (eds.), Focus strategies in African languages: The interaction of focus and grammar in Niger-Congo and Afro-Asiatic (Trends in Linguistics 191), 241–263. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.), and existence (e.g. Rooth, Mats. 1999. Association with focus or association with presupposition? In Peter Bosch & Rob van der Sandt (eds.), Focus: Linguistic, cognitive, and computational perspectives, 232–244. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.; von Fintel, Kai & Lisa Matthewson. 2008. Universals in semantics. The Linguistic Review 25(1–2). 139–201). This paper investigates these three inferences. In Akan and Ga, the marked focus constructions are found to be contrastive, while in Ngamo, no effect of contrast was found. We also show that marked focus constructions in Ga and Akan trigger exhaustivity and existence presuppositions, while the marked construction in Ngamo merely gives rise to an exhaustive conversational implicature and does not trigger an existence presupposition. Instead, the marked construction in Ngamo merely indicates salience of the backgrounded part via a morphological background marker related to the definite determiner (Schuh, Russell G. 2005. Yobe state, Nigeria as a linguistic area. Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 31(2). 77–94; Güldemann, Tom. 2016. Maximal backgrounding=focus without (necessary) focus encoding. Studies in Language 40(3). 551–590). The paper thus contributes to the understanding of the semantics of marked focus constructions across languages and points to the crosslinguistic variation in expressing and interpreting marked focus/background constructions.

Prizes for Books in African Languages. Awards in Fourth Competition

Africa ◽  
1934 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 374-375
Keyword(s):  
Executive Council ◽  
African Languages ◽  
First Time

The awards in the fourth competition for books written by Africans in African languages have now been made, and the list of prize-winners is given below. This was the first time that only three languages were selected for competition, these being Yoruba, Kikuyu, and Chuana. Altogether 39 manuscripts were received, divided among the selected languages as follows: Yoruba 18, Kikuyu 12, Chuana 9. The experts who assisted in the examination of the entries were: Mr. A. Hunt Cooke, Archdeacon J. McKay, Mr. H. G. Ramshaw for Yoruba; Rev. T. F. C Bewes, Mr. W. Scott Dickson, Mrs. Rampley for Kikuyu; Herr F. Krüger for Chuana; and the Sub-Committee appointed by the Executive Council to judge the manuscripts desires to express its indebtedness to these experts for the careful reports submitted, which gready facilitated the work.

Syntactic–semantic interface in the acquisition of verb morphology

2004 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
RICHARD M. WEIST ◽  
ALEKSANDRA PAWLAK ◽  
JENELL CARAPELLA
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Dimensional System ◽  
Perfective Aspect ◽  
Verb Morphology ◽  
Progressive Aspect ◽  
Acquisition Process ◽  
Deictic Relations ◽  
Learning English

The purpose of this research was to show how the syntactic and semantic components of the tense–aspect system interact during the acquisition process. Our methodology involved: (1) identifying predicates, (2) finding the initial occurrence of their tense–aspect morphology, and (3) observing the emergence of contrasts. Six children learning Polish and six children learning English, found in the CHILDES archives, were investigated. The average starting age of the children learning English was 1;11, and 1;8 for the children learning Polish. In the first analysis, we traced the same 12 verbs in both languages, and in the second analysis, we contrasted the acquisition patterns for a set of telic versus atelic predicates. We tracked the verbs/predicates from the starting age to 4;11 or the child's final transcript. In English, progressive aspect is the marked form, and in Polish, perfective aspect is the marked form. This typological distinction has a significant effect of the acquisition patterns in the two languages. We argue that children acquire a multi-dimensional system having deictic relations as one of the basic dimensions. This process can be best understood within a functional theoretical framework having a well-defined syntactic–semantic interface.

Are non-standard dialects more ‘natural’ than the standard? A test case from English verb morphology

2010 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
LIESELOTTE ANDERWALD
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Network Model ◽  
Test Case ◽  
New Members ◽  
Verb Morphology ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
English Dialect ◽  
First Time ◽  
English Verb

In this article, I argue that at least in some subsets of grammar, non-standard dialects are indeed more natural than their standard counterparts. I present data from the new Freiburg English Dialect corpus FRED, for the first time comparing and quantifying traditional dialect data from across the whole of Great Britain. The most frequent non-standard verb forms cluster around forms likedrink–drunk–drunkandsing–sung–sung. The framework of Natural Morphology (Wurzel 1984, 1987) in combination with Bybee's Network Model (Bybee 1985, 1995) is employed to define the notion of naturalness and to explain why this verb class has been strengthened historically, and is still attracting new members today.

‘Classical Hausa’ Glosses in a Nineteenth-Century Qur'anic Manuscript: A Case of ‘Translational Reading’ in Sudanic Africa?

2013 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 84-122
Author(s):  
Nikolay Dobronravin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Systematic Study ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Arabic Text ◽  
African Languages ◽  
Arabic Script ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
First Time ◽  
Modern Standard

This article presents an analysis of Hausa glosses in a nineteenth-century Qur'anic manuscript (C1688) from the library of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in St Petersburg, and argues that a systematic study of Arabic manuscripts with Hausa glosses is needed for a re-interpretation of early Hausa writings in Arabic script. The origins of the Hausa written tradition in Arabic script and the evolution of the concept ‘Ajami’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from ‘non-Arabic (language, culture, etc.)’ to ‘a variety of Arabic script adapted to African languages (with additional vowel-signs and diacritics)’ is discussed, and it is suggested that the frequency of the marginal notes ʿajam and ʿajamī used to mark non-Arabic glosses in Arabic manuscripts might depend on the linguistic properties of the manuscripts as well as sub-regional traditions of writing in Sudanic Africa. Hausa glosses in the St Petersburg manuscript – including nouns, adjectives, verbs and verbal constructions – are described in same detail. Special attention is paid to borrowings from Arabic and negative verbal constructions which are not attested in Hausa dialects and modern Standard Hausa. For the first time in Hausa studies, the shift in the meaning of the Hausa word shisshigi (from ‘acting tyrannically’ to ‘meddlesomeness’) is explored. The glosses are compared with the Arabic text of Tafsīr al-Jalālayn and two modern Hausa tafāsīr, those of Abubakar Mahmud Gumi and Nasiru Kabara. It is demonstrated that the Hausa glosses in the St Petersburg Qur'anic MS share a greater affinity with Kabara's tafsīr than with Gumi's translation, and, on this basis, suggested that the translational practices reflected in the St Petersburg manuscript and in Kabara's tafsīr might be linked with the Qādiriyya tradition of Arabic-Hausa ‘translational reading’.

scholarly journals Nouns and verbs in Chintang: children's usage and surrounding adult speech

2011 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 284-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
SABINE STOLL ◽  
BALTHASAR BICKEL ◽  
ELENA LIEVEN ◽  
NETRA P. PAUDYAL ◽  
GOMA BANJADE ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Verbal Morphology ◽  
Verb Morphology ◽  
Linguistic Research ◽  
Development Levels ◽  
Noun Bias

ABSTRACTAnalyzing the development of the noun-to-verb ratio in a longitudinal corpus of four Chintang (Sino-Tibetan) children, we find that up to about age four, children have a significantly higher ratio than adults. Previous cross-linguistic research rules out an explanation of this in terms of a universal noun bias; instead, a likely cause is that Chintang verb morphology is polysynthetic and difficult to learn. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that the development of Chintang children's noun-to-verb ratio correlates significantly with the extent to which they show a similar flexibility with verbal morphology to that of the surrounding adults, as measured by morphological paradigm entropy. While this development levels off around age three, children continue to have a higher overall noun-to-verb ratio than adults. A likely explanation lies in the kinds of activities that children are engaged in and that are almost completely separate from adults' activities in this culture.

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