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This volume contains a selection of papers that were presented at the 53rd Annual Conference on African Linguistics, which was held virtually at the University of California San Diego. There are 21 papers covering phonology, morphology, syntax, lexical semantics, sociolinguistics, typology and historical linguistics. The volume features a keynote paper that proposes a novel community-based approach to language documentation. African languages investigated in detail include Wolof, Mende, Dangme, Kusaal, Nzema, Anii, Nigerian Pidgin, Tunen, Nyokon, Vale, Lokoya, Lopit, Otuho, Kalenjin, Tiriki, Oromo, Tigrinya, Asá, Qwadza, and Ikalanga.
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.
Descriptive and Theoretical Approaches to African Linguistics contains a selection of revised and peer-reviewed papers from the 49th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, held at Michigan State University in 2018. The contributions from both students and more senior scholars, based in North America, Africa and other parts of the world, provide a glimpse of the breadth and quality of current research in African linguistics from both descriptive and theoretical perspectives. Fields of interest range from phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics to sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, discourse analysis, language documentation, computational linguistics and beyond. The articles reflect both the typological and genetic diversity of languages in Africa and the wide range of research areas covered by presenters at ACAL conferences.
This book provides an account of the structure of A-bar constructions, focusing on wh-questions and fragment answers in Dagbani, a Mabia (Gur) language spoken in Northern Ghana. It demonstrates that Dagbani wh-phrases occur in two distinct positions, ex-situ and in-situ, except for subject wh-phrases, which only occur in the former position. It provides a theoretical analysis of the distribution of the wh-phrases couched within minimalism (Chomsky 1995). Finally, the book gives an account of the structural correlation between wh-questions and their answers with the focus on the syntactic derivation of fragment answers. The author contends that the derivation of fragment answer involves two processes: A-bar movement together with PF-deletion
The Handbook of African Linguistics provides a holistic coverage of the key themes, subfields, approaches and practical application to the vast areas subsumable under African linguistics that will serve researchers working across the wide continuum in the field. Established and emerging scholars of African languages who are active and current in their fields are brought together, each making use of data from a linguistic group in Africa to explicate a chosen theme within their area of expertise, and illustrate the practice of the discipline in the continent.
This monograph covers basic aspects of the phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics of Dagaare.
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