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A Reference Grammar of Mbili

A Reference Grammar of Mbili PDF Author: Funwi F. Ayuninjam
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 9780761811206
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 484

Book Description
A Reference Grammar of Mbili explores the major linguistic components of the Mbili language from a primarily descriptive point of view and within the cultural context of this Bantu language spoken in Cameroon. It presents a detailed and accessible account of the roots and history of the language, clearly situated within both the Niger Congo language group in general and the Grassfield Bantu language sub group specifically. The language portion begins with a descriptive introduction to the sound segments of Mbili and the methods of combining them. It then moves into the suprasegments of the language, including tone, stress, and intonation; it investigates the interaction of tone, tense, and mood, as well as the distribution of tone and intonation in Mbili. Segmental and suprasegmental phonemes are related in terms of what they require, tolerate, and exclude. The next presentation deals with the morphology of nouns and verbs. On the one hand it establishes a structural identification of the noun classes and determines a functional and semantic categorization of the classifiers; on the other hand it identifies and relates the temporal, aspectual, and modal categories of Mbili, and also studies the semantics of the verb through a case grammar analysis. Finally, the book approaches syntax through a clause and sentence level of analysis to explain the nature of sentence structure in a manner related to English sentence structure. The appendix contains a lexicon as well as traditional folk stories and their translations to convey aspects of Cameroonian culture and examples of the nature of the Mbili language.

A Reference Grammar of Mbili

A Reference Grammar of Mbili PDF Author: Funwi F. Ayuninjam
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 9780761811206
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 484

Book Description
A Reference Grammar of Mbili explores the major linguistic components of the Mbili language from a primarily descriptive point of view and within the cultural context of this Bantu language spoken in Cameroon. It presents a detailed and accessible account of the roots and history of the language, clearly situated within both the Niger Congo language group in general and the Grassfield Bantu language sub group specifically. The language portion begins with a descriptive introduction to the sound segments of Mbili and the methods of combining them. It then moves into the suprasegments of the language, including tone, stress, and intonation; it investigates the interaction of tone, tense, and mood, as well as the distribution of tone and intonation in Mbili. Segmental and suprasegmental phonemes are related in terms of what they require, tolerate, and exclude. The next presentation deals with the morphology of nouns and verbs. On the one hand it establishes a structural identification of the noun classes and determines a functional and semantic categorization of the classifiers; on the other hand it identifies and relates the temporal, aspectual, and modal categories of Mbili, and also studies the semantics of the verb through a case grammar analysis. Finally, the book approaches syntax through a clause and sentence level of analysis to explain the nature of sentence structure in a manner related to English sentence structure. The appendix contains a lexicon as well as traditional folk stories and their translations to convey aspects of Cameroonian culture and examples of the nature of the Mbili language.

Negation Patterns in West African Languages and Beyond

Negation Patterns in West African Languages and Beyond PDF Author: Norbert Cyffer
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027289395
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 379

Book Description
This volume deals with issues on negation patterns in languages of West Africa and the adjacent north and east. The first aim is to provide data on various aspects of negation in African languages. Although the topics addressed here reflect a great diversity of negation patterns, the following typological features have been identified to be prominent in our region: conflict or even incompatibility between negation and focus, use of other indirect means of negating non-indicative mood (covered under the term ‘Prohibitive’), different negation patterns in different Tense-Aspect-Moods (e.g. Imperfective vs. Perfective), lack of negative indefinites, and disjunctive negative marking (often referred to as ‘double negation’). The articles presented here show that areal factors have played a significant role in the development of negation strategies in the languages of West Africa and beyond. On the other hand genetic factors seem to be less prominent.

On reconstructing Proto-Bantu grammar

On reconstructing Proto-Bantu grammar PDF Author: Koen Bostoen
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3985540640
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 862

Book Description
This book is about reconstructing the grammar of Proto-Bantu, the ancestral language at the origin of current-day Bantu languages. While Bantu is a low-level branch of Niger-Congo, the world’s biggest phylum, it is still Africa’s biggest language family. This edited volume attempts to retrieve the phonology, morphology and syntax used by the earliest Bantu speakers to communicate with each other, discusses methods to do so, and looks at issues raised by these academic endeavours. It is a collective effort involving a fine mix of junior and senior scholars representing several generations of expert historical-comparative Bantu research. It is the first systematic approach to Proto-Bantu grammar since Meeussen’s Bantu Grammatical Reconstructions (1967). Based on new bodies of evidence from the last five decades, most notably from northwestern Bantu languages, this book considerably transforms our understanding of Proto-Bantu grammar and offers new methodological approaches to Bantu grammatical reconstruction.

An Introduction to Linguistic Typology

An Introduction to Linguistic Typology PDF Author: Viveka Velupillai
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027211981
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 540

Book Description
Offers an introduction to linguistic typology that covers various linguistic domains from phonology and morphology over parts-of-speech, the NP and the VP, to simple and complex clauses, pragmatics and language change. This title also includes a discussion on methodological issues in typology.

Youth Language Practices and Urban Language Contact in Africa

Youth Language Practices and Urban Language Contact in Africa PDF Author: Rajend Mesthrie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107171202
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Book Description
An up-to-date, theoretically informed study of male, in-group, street-aligned, youth language practice in various urban centres in Africa.

Human Language Technology. Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics

Human Language Technology. Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics PDF Author: Zygmunt Vetulani
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031053281
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 383

Book Description
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th Language and Technology Conference: Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics, LTC 2019, held in Poznan, Poland, in May 2019. The 24 revised papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 67 submissions. The papers are categorized into the following topical sub-headings: Speech Processing; Language Resources and Tools; Computational Semantics; Emotions, Decisions and Opinions; Digital Humanities; Evaluation; and Legal Aspects.

The Emergence of Distinctive Features

The Emergence of Distinctive Features PDF Author: Jeff Mielke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199207917
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Book Description
"The Emergence of Distinctive Features will be of essential interest to phonologists and typologists, as well as to syntacticians, cognitive scientists, and scholars outside linguistics interested in the nature of language and its acquisition."--BOOK JACKET.

Typological Studies

Typological Studies PDF Author: Guglielmo Cinque
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317691245
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
In this book, Cinque takes a generative perspective on typological questions relating to word order and to the syntax of relative clauses. In particular, Cinque looks at: the position of the Head vis à vis the relative clause in relation to the position of the verb vis à vis his object; a general cross-linguistic analysis of correlatives; the need to distinguish a sentence-grammar, from a discourse-grammar, type of non-restrictives (with languages differing as to whether they possess both, one, the other, or neither); a selective type of extraction from relative clauses; and a tentative sketch of a more ample work in progress on a unified analysis of externally headed, internally headed, and headless relative clauses.

The Paradigmatic Structure of Person Marking

The Paradigmatic Structure of Person Marking PDF Author: Michael Cysouw
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191564990
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 390

Book Description
This book explores person markers, the linguistic elements that provide points of reference to speech-act participants. Michael Cysouw develops a new framework for the typology of person marking based on the rejection of the notion of plurality for its analysis. When a mother says "Mummy is going to say goodnight now", Mummy is the person marker in a way that in English is confined to motherese but which is used more commonly in some other languages and may also be characteristic of much earlier forms. Dr Cysouw divides the person markers of 400 languages into paradigms. He considers how the structure of these person paradigms relates to their function. His investigation provides a clear account of how person markers work syntactically, pragmatically, and semantically as well as giving fresh insights into aspects of linguistic change, language-relatedness, and the interfaces between discourse, syntax, and semantics. The combination of a typological and a comparative approach results in the first outline of a cognitive map of the paradigmatic structure of person marking.

Functional Structure from Top to Toe

Functional Structure from Top to Toe PDF Author: Peter Svenonius
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199740399
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
This volume consists of nine original chapters on central issues in theoretical syntax, all written by distinguished authors who have made major contributions to generative syntax, plus an introductory chapter by the editor. Dedicated to Tarald Taraldsen, the collection reflects the diverse energies that have pushed the cartographic program forward over the last decade. The first three papers deal with subject extraction, the que/qui alternation, and relative clause formation. Luigi Rizzi presents arguments that subjects are 'criterial' and that subject extraction is highly restricted. Hilda Koopman and Dominique Sportiche concur, suggesting that what appears to be subject extraction in French has been misanalyzed, and involves a relative structure. Adriana Belletti shows that children avoid using object relatives, preferring subject relatives, even when it requires passivization. The fourth paper, by Ian Roberts, analyzes the loss of pro-drop in the history of French and Brazilian Portuguese. The papers by M. Rita Manzini and Richard S. Kayne both present novel analyses of complementizers, suggesting that they are essentially nominal, rather than verbal. The final three papers address the relationship of morphology to syntax. The first two argue for a syntactic approach to word formation, Guglielmo Cinque's in a typological context and Anders Holmberg's within an analysis of Finnish focus constructions. The final paper, by Edwin Williams, presents an argument for the limitations of the syntactic approach to word formation.