Niger-Congo Research Articles

Shì as a Complementizer

In this article, it is argued that a purely functional and semantically bleached shì in Mandarin could in many contexts be best analyzed as a complementizer. As such, i t is comparable to English that and functions as an (optional) introducer of the clausal arguments. Our survey shows that the morpheme shì as a complementizer occurs after quite a number of clause introducing operators, for instance, epistemic modals, clausal adverbs, clausal conjunctions, and verbs taking clausal objects like psych verbs and speech act verbs. Like in some other languages, e.g., the West African language Twi and Dutch, the complementizer can merge with a preceding element and the two elements are turned into one frozen combination involving reanalysis and constituency rebracketing . We argue that Mandarin shì has gone through similar developments as complementizer in many frozen combinations such as shuōshì . As a piece of additional evidence, we find that in Gangou dialect, a Mandarin variant, shì can also take on a complementizer function. In the end, based on the fact that shì is used as a demonstrative pronoun in Pre Qin times, we argue that Mandarin indeed has complementizers from two different sources out of the five major sources across languages listed by Chappell (2017), i.e., shuō , the complementizer (as argued by many) originally from a verb of saying, and shì , originally a demonstrative.

Movement and interpretation of quantifiers in internally-headed relative clauses

This paper addresses the semantic typology of internally-headed relative clauses using a case study of two West African languages, Atchan (Kwa) and Bùlì (Gur). Both languages exhibit syntactically-similar relatives, involving overt movement of the head. However, quantifiers on the head are interpreted differently in the two languages. In Atchan, quantifiers on the relative-clause head take the entire relative clause as their restriction; in Bùlì, quantifiers on the head take only the head noun as their restriction. I propose that the former is interpreted via NP reconstruction and Trace Conversion, the latter via DP reconstruction. The empirical difference between these two languages motivates a revision to the typology developed by Grosu (2012), which tightly links head movement and the Atchan-like quantifier interpretation pattern. This work further supports a a modular view in which languages can adopt different strategies to interpret movement-involving structures.

Le statut mono ou bi-phonématique des prénasales en Ulund

Monophonematic or Biphonematic Status of Prenasals in Ulund
 The manɟaku group is a linguistic group that so far includes 15 dialects: ucuur, uɟool, utufan, ubok, ubuj, ujang, uciban-ukan, usiis, uteer, useerar, ulëkës, ubo- mat, uñoob-utam, uyu and ulund. The ulund language of the manɟaku group is taken as a sample in this inquiry. Its speakers call each other the Balund. The latter are thought to be originated in Guinea Bissau, and their main area of concentration is in pəlund, from which the name of the language's speakers is derived. The Balund began migrating from Guinea Bissau to Senegal in colonial times, due to the abuse they suffered in Portuguese lands. They settled in the southern part of Senegal, notably in the Ziguinchor and Kolda regions. It should be noted that despite their distinguisehd Islamization, the Balund remain very attached to their language and are close to their ancient cults and traditions.Our knowledge of Ulund speech is fragmentary, focusing on specific aspects of the language such as the study of nominal classes, the study of the pronominal system, the study of the verb, etc. We note that there are no in- depth studies of the phonetic system, hence the motivation for the study of ulund complex consonants in this article. Consonants are articulations produced with a total or partial obstruction at any point in the vocal tract. Consonants are a highly heterogeneous set of sounds, both articulatory and acoustic. The type of constriction in the vocal tract distinguishes an occlusive consonant from a constrictive consonant. Occlusives are characterized by a silence resulting from the complete closure of the vocal tract (occlusion) at a well-defined point. The fricatives, among the constrictives, are characterized by aerodynamic frictional noises created by turbulent airflow at a point in the vocal tract, presenting a strong constriction at the place of articulation. The mi-nasals are combinations of oral consonants (occlusive or constrictive) + nasal consonants (consonant produced with the lowering of the soft palate).The question of the interpretation of prenasals in many languages, particularly African languages, has already been the subject of a multitude of analyses. This study, which is intended as a modest contribution, in no way claims to list all the specific features of the West Atlantic languages already studied. Our aim is rather to give an overview of what is already known in this field, focusing on the phonetic aspect, so that our young students, when describing a new language of the Niger Congo sub-group, are not obliged to invest a great deal of effort and time on questions which have already been dealt with and answered.

A Typological and Diachronic Analysis of Replication: Body-Part Reflexives in Romance-Lexifier Pidgins and Creoles

Abstract The fact that body-part reflexives (bpr s) are widespread in Romance-lexifier pidgin, creole and mixed (pcm) languages of the Atlantic area has usually been accounted for in terms of substratum influence from West African languages, in which such reflexives are common. However, this approach does not explain why bpr s are also frequently found in Romance-lexifier pcm languages like Zamboanga Chavacano and Malacca Creole, which lack a demonstrable African substrate, are spoken outside the Atlantic area and are in contact with languages that lack bpr s. Drawing on cross-linguistic as well as historical corpus data, this paper argues that the source of bpr s in these languages should be traced back to the late-medieval and early-Renaissance lexifiers. More specifically, it is proposed that speakers of Romance-lexifier pcm languages identified, recapitulated and replicated reflexive-like uses of words such as ‘body’ and ‘head’ in the lexifiers. A number of bridging contexts is argued to have fostered these processes.

Tima

Tima (ISO 639-3: tms) is a Niger-Congo language spoken by roughly 7,000 people in the Nuba mountains of Sudan, in north-eastern Africa, as well as in smaller communities in the bigger towns of Sudan such as Khartoum and Port Sudan. It is part of the Katla language group which includes the languages Katla and Julut as well as Tima, with Tima being the most distinct of the three. All three languages are regarded as endangered, mainly due to the spreading influence of Arabic in recent decades, but also due to greater speaker mobility. Broadly speaking, there is a decline in speaker fluency from older to younger speakers of Tima. The Tima people are not only exposed to Arabic as the lingua franca and official language of Sudan, but also to English and Kiswahili. These latter languages were introduced into the school system during the extremely difficult circumstances of the second civil war (1983–2005), when teachers from Kenya came to the Tima region (in addition, many Tima people went to Kenya for further education).1

Assessing the Phonological Processes in Akan Child Language

This paper seeks to examine the phonological processes embedded in the speech errors of child phonology in Akan, a Niger-Congo (Kwa) language. The study has become necessary because cross-linguistically, several works have been undertaken on child language acquisition but very little or no attention has been given to that of Akan. Most of these works on African languages have centered on the acquisition processes with little on the phonological processes underpinning child language. Therefore, this study bridges the gap by providing a discussion of some phonological processes that underline the acquisition of Akan children. In the course of the phonological development of the Akan child as part of language acquisition, these processes occur as phonological simplification strategies to resolve relatively challenging natural adult forms of Akan expressions. This is either due to an articulatory accident or a defect in the speech organ. It is against this backdrop that Fromkin (1973) opines that a slip of tongue is evidence of a phonological process in action. Hence, this paper concludes that the inadequacies in child language acquisition trigger various phonological processes such as vocalization, stopping, de-affrication, anteriorization, fronting, cluster reduction, reduplication as a phonological simplification strategy in the acquisition of Akan.

Review article: messages from (not so distant) relatives in the Nuba Mountains: on how (not) to reconstruct Proto-Bantu

Abstract The rich morphological systems and discourse-based syntactic structures of a range of modern Bantu languages have attracted the attention of many linguists. The present contribution takes articles in a volume on the reconstruction of Proto-Bantu grammar edited by Bostoen et al. (2022. On Reconstructing Proto-Bantu Grammar, Niger-Congo Comparative Studies 4. Berlin: Language Science Press. 808 pp. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7560553) as a basis, in order to address the origin of these grammatical properties. More specifically, historical as well as synchronic features of Bantu languages are compared with Tima, a related language spoken in the Nuba Mountains, Sudan, and classified as a member of the Kordofanian family within Niger-Congo by Greenberg. Contrary to a popular view, it is claimed here that subject inversion and corresponding (extended) ergative alignment marking with transitive verbs is not only a property of Tima as a Niger-Congo language, but also of several Niger-Congo languages classified as Bantu. Tima consequently may perform a role similar to that of Tocharian in the history of Indo-European studies. The present contribution also raises methodological issues related to lexicon-based Bayesian phylogenetics as against Greenberg’s method of multilateral comparisons, and the historical-comparative method. In addition, it addresses the question of the extent to which the spread of typological features coincides with so-called “belts” postulated in the typological literature on African languages.

The Dynamics of the Past and Future Tense Expressions in Dagbani

This paper discusses the degree of remoteness in Dagbani, a Mabia (Gur) language of the Niger-Congo language family spoken in Northern Ghana. The degree of remoteness has been discussed in Dagbani (Olawsky1999; Bodomo 2001; Botne 2012; Bodomo 2018). According to the scholars mentioned above, the verbal particles; sa, di and daa mark degree of remoteness in Dagbani. However, these scholars have not discussed all the possible means degree of remoteness can be expressed in the language. The time adverbials, the proximity markers, yɛ̂n and yólí, and others are not looked at. This paper, therefore, moves a step further to discuss the possible remoteness distinctions that are part of the ways tense is expressed in Dagbani. The paper uses Comrie’s (1985) conceptualisation of tense in human language in the discussion. Comrie’s explanation of the phenomenon shows that in some languages, the degree of remoteness is expressed using the time adverbials and other particles. Eliciting data from eight people in Tamale and Yendi, and existing literature, I support my intuition as a native speaker to demonstrate that the time adverbials and other particles either than only daa, sa and di express degree of remoteness in both past and future tenses in Dagbani.

Rhythm pattern discovery in Niger-Congo story-telling

Description of interactive oral story-telling in West African Niger-Congo languages, “orature” in contrast to “literature”, has traditionally been firmly in the domain of anthropological linguistics. The discourse structures of narrator-responder interaction and call-response chanted interludes and their prosody are an open challenge to discourse analysts, linguists and phoneticians. Two orature examples from related Niger-Congo languages, recorded during fieldwork in Côte d'Ivoire, are analyzed from a macrostructural acoustic phonetic perspective in terms of realtime rhythms, and then compared with other related orature examples and examples of reading aloud. In this transdisciplinary methodology, long time domains of up to 5 min in duration and beyond are studied using long-term spectra and spectrograms of the amplitude modulation of speech. Long-distance timing regularities and their variation during story-telling exchanges are analyzed in detail and explained in terms of Rhythm Formant Theory (RFT), a further development of Speech Modulation Theory, and its associated methodology Rhythm Formant Analysis (RFA).

Preverbs: Their syntax and semantics in West Africa

Preverbs are positionally-delimited grammatical forms that remain understudied. We examine their semantic classes in West Benue Congo (WBC) and its minor language Emai, which until recently was undocumented. Preverb classes in Emai display a subset of semantic categories identified in Dixon (1991, 2006, 2010) and Nuyts (2001, 2005, 2006, 2016). There are eight semantic classes for 30 odd preverb forms. They are apportioned according to their qualitative or quantitative character. Preverbs do not include traditional auxiliary categories of aspect, tense, and modality, which exhibit distinct diachronic and synchronic character. Common to preverbs is their orientation to grammatical subject, rather than utterance speaker. Members of each class ascribe a property to clausal subject. Preliminary evidence suggests that preverbs of similar semantic character exist in other West African languages.

The impact of attentional centering on ergative marking in Tima

AbstractOne of the languages on the African continent which displays ergative features is Tima, a Niger-Congo language spoken in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. In this contribution, the impact of attentional centering – influenced by factors including the animacy of the participants, the identifiability of the agent, and the givenness of either A or P participant – on the choice of construction between AVO and OVAergis investigated. The research brought forth the following findings: token-identifiable human agents typically trigger an AVO constituent order; type-identifiable human agents typically trigger anOVAergconstituent order; the event described may or may not be decomposed into two sub-events; inanimate agents acting on human animates trigger a decomposition of the event into two sub-events: first, P is presented, and second, A is introduced as an ergative-marked participant following the verb. The information structural device of givenness interacts with the two parameters of agent-identifiability and animacy. A given agent always leads to an AVO construction. A given patient finds the speaker faced with the choice of opting for an AVO or anOVAergconstruction.

Anomalies in the Noun Class Systems of Niger-Congo: Towards a Typology of the Atypical

The paper focuses on minor noun classes and minor genders in Niger-Congo languages, which are usually regarded as anomalies in class systems. It takes into consideration data from 243 languages, and shows that such anomalies are most characteristic for quite specific meanings, namely those traditionally regarded as prototypical meanings of noun classes: ‘person’, ‘thing’, ‘foot’, ‘tree’, ‘eye’, ‘place’, etc. Thus, the particular patterns of class agreement observed, or particular correlations between singular and plural noun classes, often do not represent accidental exceptions, but are better thought of as a kind of marker of noun class paradigmatic semantics.

Semantic Analysis of «False- Friends»: A Case Study of English and Siin Seereer

The article is devoted to the semantic analysis of words called “False- Friends” in English and Siin Seereer. “False- Friends” are words belonging to two different languages and which have a great similarity in form between them or are written in the same, but whose meanings are different. In other words, a word is considered “False- Friend” when it is close in its writing or pronunciation to a term of another language but whose meaning is different. Thus, the study focuses on some words that belong both to English and Siin Seereer languages and whose meanings are different. English and Seereer are two different languages which do not belong to the same language family. English belongs to the Indo European language family, whereas Seereer is part of the West Atlantic branch of the Niger-Congo family. However, there are several identical words (in terms of writing) in these two languages and whose meanings may cause lots of difficulties to Seereer native speakers who learn English and to English native speakers who learn Seereer language. Furthermore, the study and/or analysis of these “False-Friends” arouse several questions some of which: Why do these two languages share these common words? Do these words have certain meanings in common? Do they belong to the same grammatical categories? Are they structured in the same way in both languages? Do these “False-Friends” have the same pronunciation in English and Seereer? What are their linguistic similarities and differences? To find answers to these questions, we will strive to explore the writings of some Seereer students. Field surveys as well as interviews of native speakers will also be organized and analyzed in this study. In addition, we will read documents (books, articles, novels, stories, etc.) written in English and in Siin Seereer. This research will help us have a lot of information and collect data for the corpus. After the elaboration of the corpus, we will move on to data analysis and we will end up with results that we are going to present during the discussions.

The noncausal/causal alternation and genealogical affiliation: Quantitative testing in three Niger-Congo language families

The noncausal/causal alternation is the pairing of two verb forms that refer to the same core event but differ in the absence vs. presence of a causer for this event (e.g. rise vs. raise, open (intr.) vs. open (tr.), die vs. kill). Languages differ in their overall preferences among the possible strategies for coding this alternation. This study uses machine-learning methods (clustering and tree-based computational classifiers) to investigate the predictive power of the noncausal/causal alternation for the genealogical affiliation of 38 languages belonging to the Atlantic, Mande and Mel families. The languages studied here belong to different contact areas in Senegal and its surroundings. The three families are all affiliated to the Niger-Congo phylum but display quite different typological profiles. The present paper elaborates on an earlier study that used a standard list of 18 verb pairs to establish the coding strategies in these languages. Apart from highlighting which coding strategies are favored in each family, our quantitative analyses show that the family affiliation of the 38 languages can be predicted with an accuracy above the majority baseline based on the information of the noncausal/causal alternation in the 18 verb pairs, but that the predictive power of verb pairs 1‑9 is generally lower than the one of verb pairs 10‑18. Our results confirm the hypothesis that the first group of verb pairs shows universal rather than lineage-specific tendencies concerning the noncausal/causal alternation. Furthermore, our analyses identify which of the 18 verb pairs (and their correlated coding strategies) have the highest predictive power. This study opens new avenues for identifying the relevant synchronic data for genealogical classification in historical linguistics. Future studies could replicate the same analysis in different language families to assess if our results are universal or specific to some language families.

The noncausal/causal alternation and genealogical affiliation: Quantitative testing in three Niger-Congo language families

The noncausal/causal alternation is the pairing of two verb forms that refer to the same core event but differ in the absence vs. presence of a causer for this event (e.g. rise vs. raise, open (intr.) vs. open (tr.), die vs. kill). Languages differ in their overall preferences among the possible strategies for coding this alternation. This study uses machine-learning methods (clustering and tree-based computational classifiers) to investigate the predictive power of the noncausal/causal alternation for the genealogical affiliation of 38 languages belonging to the Atlantic, Mande and Mel families. The languages studied here belong to different contact areas in Senegal and its surroundings. The three families are all affiliated to the Niger-Congo phylum but display quite different typological profiles. The present paper elaborates on an earlier study that used a standard list of 18 verb pairs to establish the coding strategies in these languages. Apart from highlighting which coding strategies are favored in each family, our quantitative analyses show that the family affiliation of the 38 languages can be predicted with an accuracy above the majority baseline based on the information of the noncausal/causal alternation in the 18 verb pairs, but that the predictive power of verb pairs 1‑9 is generally lower than the one of verb pairs 10‑18. Our results confirm the hypothesis that the first group of verb pairs shows universal rather than lineage-specific tendencies concerning the noncausal/causal alternation. Furthermore, our analyses identify which of the 18 verb pairs (and their correlated coding strategies) have the highest predictive power. This study opens new avenues for identifying the relevant synchronic data for genealogical classification in historical linguistics. Future studies could replicate the same analysis in different language families to assess if our results are universal or specific to some language families.

The contribution of full tone marking to oral reading fluency and comprehension in Yoruba and Ife

Abstract Orthographic depth is a key concept in literacy acquisition and can be measured separately for completeness, simplicity and consistency. The first of these is pertinent to discussions about whether tone should be marked in African orthographies, because a zero tone representation is relatively incomplete and deep whereas a full tone orthography is relatively complete and shallow. We undertook a series of literacy experiments in ten Niger-Congo languages to test the extent to which full tone marking contributes to reading and writing skills. In a within-subject design that closely follows Bird (1999b), participants orally read two full tone and two zero tone texts and also added tone accents to unmarked versions of two of the texts. Speed, accuracy, comprehension, as well as a range of linguistic, ethno-literacy, demographic and L2 literacy variables were tracked. The present article narrows the scope of the wider research project (Roberts & Walter 2021) to two of the languages, Yoruba and Ife, which are linguistically similar, yet have highly dissimilar results. In Yoruba, full tone marking does not contribute to any improvement in reading measurements, and tone writing skills are generally poor. In Ife, on the other hand, full tone marking contributes to speed, accuracy and comprehension, and tone writing is the most accurate of all the languages. The results suggest that the social profile of the participant and the ethno-literacy profile of the language community are more predictive of reading and writing performance than is the linguistic profile of the language.

Morphology-syntax mismatches in agreement systems: The case of Jóola Fóoñi

The present study examines the agreement system of Jóola Fóoñi (Atlantic, Niger-Congo). In Niger-Congo languages, noun forms divide into subsets according to their agreement patterns. The morphological paradigm of the agreement targets is generally analysed as a reflex of agreement triggered by nominal controllers. For Jóola Fóoñi this view is not correct since (i) the range of subsets of noun forms and the range of values on the agreement targets do not match and (ii) inflection for a subset of class values is associated with its own semantic and syntactic properties, independent of agreement configurations with nouns. In Jóola Fóoñi the classification of noun forms based on their agreement properties and the cells of the inflectional paradigm of adnominal and pronominal agreement targets are related but independent components of the grammar. Of the 15 class-values that structure the inflectional paradigm of adnominals and pronouns involved in the expression of agreement with heads or antecedents, only 13 class-values function as agreement values with nominal controllers; the other 2 class-values only appear on agreement targets. The inflectional paradigm characterising agreeing adnominals and pronouns is heterogeneous in several respects. (i) Of the 15 class-values in the inflectional paradigm, only 12 allow non-contextual uses without a nominal controller, each associated with a particular meaning. (ii) Non-contextual uses of the 5 class-values expressing time, manner and different conceptualizations of space display adverbial syntax, while the other class-values show pronominal syntax. (iii) Of the 5 class-values associated with adverbial syntax, the 3 locative classes differ from the classes associated with time and manner with respect to relativisation. We propose that the forms inflected for class that express place, time or manner in their non-contextual use have become adverbs, and the locative relativisers have been reanalysed as locative relative pronouns.

Restructured Niger-Congo gender systems as another type of concurrent nominal classification

AbstractRecent research looks increasingly at languages with more than one system of nominal classification and first systematic typological assessments of so-called “concurrent noun classification” exist with a focus on cases involving classifiers and gender. We elaborate on this work by dealing with Niger-Congo languages that have restructured their inherited noun classification in a particular way. The inherited system entailing a strong parallelism between agreement-based gender and affix-based noun inflections shifted toward one where the gender system is reduced to an animacy-based opposition while nominal inflection maintains a considerable amount of original complexity with semantic criteria beyond those of the innovative gender distinction. While the phenomenon as such is not a new discovery, its typological relevance has gone unrecognized so far. We argue that such cases of restructured gender systems in Niger-Congo prima facie suggest themselves as candidates for a new type of concurrent noun classification, both from a synchronic and diachronic perspective. We present a detailed description of the phenomenon in the Guang language Gonja and determine whether or how it can be integrated in the available typology. We also survey its wider distribution and discuss some recurrent historical aspects of its emergence in the family.

Berom Exocentric Compounds: A Structural and Semantic Analysis of the N-V Compounds

In this study, we examine exocentric compounds in Berom; a minority Niger-Congo language that is spoken in parts of central Nigeria and describe the structural and semantic properties of N-V compounds. Basically, the study is designed to achieve three aims: to contribute to the documentation of Berom, to provide the structural classification of exocentric compounds in the language and to provide the semantics of N-V compounds. Contrary to the nominalization process in defining the lexical class of compounds in languages, we show that in Berom compounding, the verbal and adjectival compounds are also attested. Based on a data set of 200 compound words that were previously drawn from Bere Naha (a newsletter publication in Berom), we propose three categories of exocentric compounds in Berom: Nominal Compounds [NC] and Verbal Compounds [VC] and Adjectival compounds and present the structure of each category by showing the class of their constituents. We show that Berom, N-V compounds have a nominal classification that are interpreted as agentive or locative nouns. We conclude that the meaning of Berom N-V compounds may not be solely determined by the sheer interpretation of the constituents of the compound.   

Core/Cultural Borrowing in Sabaot from Kiswahili: An analysis of Sabaot/Kiswahili Bilinguals in Mount Elgon Region, Kenya

This study is an analysis of lexical borrowing of nominals in Sabaot from Kiswahili. The two languages under study differ from each other in significant ways. Kiswahili, for example, is a language of the Niger-Congo family classified by Ethnologue as ISO 639-3: SWA, while on the other hand, Sabaot belongs to the Southern Nilotic group that occupies the Mount Elgon area. This research was guided by the specific objective; to investigate the spoken language of young, middle-aged, and older Sabaot/Kiswahili bilingual speakers. This research was guided by two theories, namely Borrowing Transfer Theory by Terence Odlin (1989) and Ethnolinguistic Vitality Theory (EVT) by Giles and Taylor (1977). As a way of data collection, a wordlist and questionnaires were issued to 30 Sabaot/Kiswahili bilinguals of Chepyuk ward in Bungoma County, Kenya. The results of the wordlist analysis indicated that there were extensive core borrowings of Kiswahili nouns into the Sabaot language. The findings further showed that the core borrowing of nouns was more among the younger and middle-aged than among the older Sabaot/Kiswahili bilinguals.