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This volume investigates the clausal syntax of Wolof, an understudied Atlantic language of Senegal. The goals of the work are descriptive, analytical, and comparative, with a focus on the structure of the left periphery and left peripheral phenomena. The book includes detailed examination of the morpho?syntax of wh?questions, successive cyclicity, subject marking, relative clauses, topic/focus articulation, and complementizer agreement. Novel data from Wolof is used to evaluate and extend theoretical proposals concerning the structure of the Complementizer Phrase (CP) and Tense Phrase (TP). It is argued that Wolof provides evidence for the promotion analysis of relative clauses, an exploded ...
This volume explores the multiple aspects of morphological complexity, offering typological, acquisitional, sociolinguistic, and diachronic perspectives. The analyses are based on rich empirical data from a wide range of languages, as well as experimental data from artificial language learning.
The main purpose of this dictionary is twofold. On the one hand, it provides the scholar of African studies with a tool to identify the possible Portuguese origin of terms present in African languages and, on the other, it offers those who are interested in Portuguese culture an overview of the presence of its lexicon in African languages. No doubt the Portuguese were among the first Europeans to explore the world outside of Europe, and as such they were also the first to introduce that world to European concepts and words.This book is the result of a long and detailed work on texts in African languages, as also shown by the rich bibliography in the dictionary.
This book proposes the reconstruction of the Proto-Niger-Congo numeral system. The emphasis is placed on providing an exhaustive account of the distribution of forms by families, groups, and branches. The big data bases used for this purpose open prospects for both working with the distribution of words that do exist and with the distribution of gaps in postulated cognates. The distribution of filled cells and gaps is a useful tool for reconstruction. Following an introduction in the first chapter, the second chapter of this book is devoted to the study of various uses of noun class markers in numeral terms. The third chapter deals with the alignment by analogy in numeral systems. Chapter 4 offers a step-by-step reconstruction of number systems of the proto-languages underlying each of the twelve major NC families, on the basis of the step-by-step-reconstruction of numerals within each family. Chapter 5 deals with the reconstruction of the Proto-Niger-Congo numeral system on the basis of the step-by-step-reconstructions offered in Chapter 4. Chapter 6 traces the history of the numerals of Proto-Niger-Congo, reconstructed in Chapter 5, in each individual family of languages.
This monograph proposes a reconstruction of the lexicon, the morphophonology and the noun class system of Proto-Fula–Sereer (~3500 BP). Fula–Sereer represents one of the six branches of the North-Atlantic group. North-Atlantic, together with the Bak group of languages, forms the Atlantic family, which represents a separate branch within the Niger-Congo macro-family. The lexical reconstruction of the proto-language of a group such as Fula–Sereer requires the solution of a number of questions that are of interest for the general theory of comparative studies. These questions deal with the morphophonological mutations of root-initial consonants. Since consonant mutations were structured i...
Includes entries for maps and atlases.
Atlantic is one of the most diversified and most problematic Niger-Congo families as far as evidence for a monogenetic origin is concerned. Moreover, the group remains poorly known. Besides well-studied languages such as Fula, Wolof and Serer some sixty lesser known languages of Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia are currently believed to belong to Atlantic. Many of these languages are not yet documented, and some never will - they disappeared some decades ago or are just on the verge of extinction. This book provides an overview of Atlantic south of the Wolof, Serer and Fula-speaking regions. The sections on the various Atlantic languages present information on phonology, morphology and basic syntacticpatterns by using General Linguistic Theory. Lexical material is presented in comparative wordlists. All data stem from the author's own fieldwork in the 1950s and 1960s in Guinea Bissau and Guinea.