African linguistics on the prairie

African linguistics on the prairie PDF Author: Jason Kandybowicz
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961100365
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
African Linguistics on the Prairie features select revised peer-reviewed papers from the 45th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, held at the University of Kansas. The articles in this volume reflect the enormous diversity of African languages, as they focus on languages from all of the major African language phyla. The articles here also reflect the many different research perspectives that frame the work of linguists in the Association for Contemporary African Linguistics. The diversity of views presented in this volume are thus indicative of the vitality of current African linguistics research. The work presented in this volume represents both descriptive and theoretical methodologies and covers fields ranging from phonetics, phonology, morphology, typology, syntax, and semantics to sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, language acquisition, computational linguistics and beyond. This broad scope and the quality of the articles contained within holds out the promise of continued advancement in linguistic research on African languages.

African linguistics on the prairie

African linguistics on the prairie PDF Author: Jason Kandybowicz
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961100365
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 460

Get Book Here

Book Description
African Linguistics on the Prairie features select revised peer-reviewed papers from the 45th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, held at the University of Kansas. The articles in this volume reflect the enormous diversity of African languages, as they focus on languages from all of the major African language phyla. The articles here also reflect the many different research perspectives that frame the work of linguists in the Association for Contemporary African Linguistics. The diversity of views presented in this volume are thus indicative of the vitality of current African linguistics research. The work presented in this volume represents both descriptive and theoretical methodologies and covers fields ranging from phonetics, phonology, morphology, typology, syntax, and semantics to sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, language acquisition, computational linguistics and beyond. This broad scope and the quality of the articles contained within holds out the promise of continued advancement in linguistic research on African languages.

Africa's Endangered Languages

Africa's Endangered Languages PDF Author: Jason Kandybowicz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190256346
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 521

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Book Description
This book examines the endangered languages of Africa from both documentary and theoretical perspectives, highlighting the threats of extinction many of them face and the challenges and implications each bring to bear on linguistic theory. It focuses on the symbiosis between documentary and theoretical methodologies, and its consequences for the preservation of endangered languages, both in the African context and more broadly.

Theory and description in African Linguistics

Theory and description in African Linguistics PDF Author: Emily Clem
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961102058
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 788

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Book Description
The papers in this volume were presented at the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics at UC Berkeley in 2016. The papers offer new descriptions of African languages and propose novel theoretical analyses of them. The contributions span topics in phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics and reflect the typological and genetic diversity of languages in Africa. Four papers in the volume examine Areal Features and Linguistic Reconstruction in Africa, and were presented at a special workshop on this topic held alongside the general session of ACAL.

Pushing the boundaries

Pushing the boundaries PDF Author: James Essegbey
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961104905
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
This volume contains some of the papers there were presented at ACAL 51-52, which was organized virtually at the University of Florida. A couple were accepted for presentation at ACAL 51, which was canceled because of COVID-19. The theme of ACAL 51-52 was African linguistics: pushing the boundaries. There are 18 papers and an introduction: two phonetics papers, five phonology papers, nine syntax papers, one sociolinguistics paper and one typology paper.

Celebrating 50 years of ACAL

Celebrating 50 years of ACAL PDF Author: Akinbiyi Akinlabi
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961103097
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
The papers in this volume were presented at the 50th Annual Conference on African Linguistics held at the University of British Columbia in 2019. The contributions span a range of theoretical topics as well as topics in descriptive and applied linguistics. The papers reflect the typological and genetic diversity of languages in Africa and also represent the breadth of the ACAL community, with papers from both students and more senior scholars, based in North America and beyond. They thus provide a snapshot on current research in African linguistics, from multiple perspectives. To mark the 50th anniversary of the conference, the volume editors reminisce, in the introductory chapter, about their memorable ACALs.

African Languages from a Role and Reference Grammar Perspective

African Languages from a Role and Reference Grammar Perspective PDF Author: Jens Fleischhauer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110795345
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The volume is a collection of papers which apply Role & Reference Grammar (RRG) to African languages. RRG is a functional theory of syntax which has been developed on the basis of two leading questions: First, how would a syntactic theory look like which starts from ‘exotic’ languages rather than English? Second, how can the interaction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics in different grammatical systems best modelled and explained? Although RRG took linguistic diversity serious from its very beginning, African languages have been underrepresented in the development of the theory. Given the sheer number African languages deserve a wider coverage in a syntactic theory which takes linguistic diversity seriously. The volume is intended to fill this gap and comprises a selection of papers which investigate different aspects related to the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface of different African languages. This includes: argument doubling and dislocation in iziZulu, complex referential phrases in Gĩkũyũ, serial verb constructions in Igbo, locative complements in Hausa and Zarma Chiine and focus constructions in Emai. The papers will extent the current RRG approach to new languages and phenomena.

Predication in African Languages

Predication in African Languages PDF Author: James Essegbey
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027247013
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
This book discusses patterns of predication and their grammatical and semantic implications in a variety of African languages. It covers several prominent topics about predication in the languages, including locative predication, expressions of tense, aspect, and mood in relation to verbal complexes and verb serialisation, verb semantics, and nominalization of predicates. The chapters take inspiration from Felix Ameka’s approach to the study of language according to which the main task of a linguist is to collaborate with language users to understand communicative practices in different contexts and to uncover how these practices impact grammatical and semantic aspects of the language. Accordingly, the descriptions and analyses in this book serve to understand language variation in different ecologies, rather than to impose pre-established descriptive frames on less described languages. Together, the chapters in the book represent a bird’s eye view of predication strategies in various African languages and can therefore serve as readings for both introductory and advanced level courses on predication from a typological or comparative perspective.

Morphosyntactic variation in East African Bantu languages

Morphosyntactic variation in East African Bantu languages PDF Author: Hannah Gibson
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3985540918
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
The approximately 500 Bantu languages spoken across vast areas of Central, Eastern and Southern Africa are united by the presence of a number of broad typological similarities, including, for example, complex noun class system and agglutinative verbal morphology. However, the languages also exhibit a high degree of micro-variation. Recent work has demonstrated fine-grained morphosyntactic variation across many Bantu languages focusing on grammatical topics such as double object constructions, inversion constructions, or object marking, adopting formal, comparative and typological perspectives. Continuing in this vein, this volume builds on the momentum of the dynamic field of morphosyntactic variation in Bantu and contributes to the growing body of work which examines morphosyntactic variation, with a regional focus on the Bantu languages of East Africa. The East African region is characterized by high linguistic complexity in terms of the number of languages spoken, in terms of the four different linguistic phyla present, and in terms of the inherent sociolinguistic dynamics. The current volume explores this complexity further by bringing together studies which investigate features of morphosyntax of an individual language as well as those which develop an in-depth examination of a single morphosyntactic phenomena in a small sample of languages. The book seeks also to add to the descriptive status of the languages under examination, as well as raising questions relating to language, language contact, language change, and micro-variation in related languages spoken in close geographic proximity.

Africa's Endangered Languages

Africa's Endangered Languages PDF Author: Jason Kandybowicz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190675284
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 521

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Book Description
Relatively little is known about Africa's endangered languages. Unlike indigenous languages in Australia, North Asia, and the Americas, which are predominantly threatened by colonizers, African languages are threatened most immediately by other local languages. As a result, the threat of language extinction is perceived as lower in Africa than in other parts of the globe, and a disproportionate amount of research is devoted to the study of endangered African languages when compared to any other linguistically threatened region in the world. There are approximately 308 highly endangered languages spoken in Africa (roughly 12% of all African languages) and at least 201 extinct African languages. This volume hopes to illuminate and challenge this trend. Chapters offer both documentary and theoretical perspectives, emphasizing the symbiotic relationship between the two approaches and its implications for the preservation of endangered languages, both in the African context and more broadly. Documentary-oriented chapters deal with key issues in African language documentation including language preservation and revitalization, community activism, and data collection and dissemination methodologies, among others. Theoretically-oriented chapters provide detailed descriptions and analyses of phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic phenomena, and connect these to current theoretical issues and debates. Africa's Endangered Languages provides thorough coverage of a continent's neglected languages that will spur linguists and Africanists alike to work to protect them.

The Verb in Nyakyusa

The Verb in Nyakyusa PDF Author: Bastian Persohn
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961102945
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
Nyakyusa is an underdescribed Bantu language spoken by around 800.000 speakers in the Mbeya Region of Tanzania. This book provides a detailled description of the verb in this language. The topics covered include the complex morphophonological and morphological processes as well as verb-to-verb derivation, copula verbs and grammaticalized verbs of motion. The main body of the book consists of a detailed description of tense, aspect and modality constructions, which includes not only an in-depth discussion of their sentence level semantics, but also of their patterns of employment in discourse.