Proquest Dissertations
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
The Creolization of Pidgin Morphophonology.Pdf
May 3,1993. Copy of work-in-progress for colleagues' private examination and comment. Version in LARGE PRINT for reading at the conference. THE CREOLIZATION OF PIDGIN MORPHOPHONOLOGY William J. Samarin Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto Meeting of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 10-11 June 1993 Abstract In support of the growing conviction that creolization, as a linguistic process, probablay begins before a 'creole' with native speakers emerges, this paper examines one of the alleged characteristics of creolization: morphophonological condensation: e.g., tônqànà > twà 'when' (Sango). Two pidgins of similar ages, one with a European lexifier language, the other with an African lexifier language, are compared: Tok Pisin and Sango. After examining seven explanations for condensation (intention, nativization, fluency, tempo, naturalness, style, child-language errors) and finding them wanting, we consider the agents of change (children and adults), evidence for condensation in the pidgin stage, the linguistic 'stuff that is changed, the etiology (the linguistic processes) of condensation in Sango, and the linguistic consequences of condensation. The latter in Sango is, among other things, the beginning of what may become subjectival prefixation and possessive suffixation. (Keywords: Creolization, Condensation, Tok Pisin, Sango, Language change, Historical linguistics, Phonology) Introduction It would help to advance the study of pidgins and Creoles if there were established a list of assertions, claims, generalizations, and the like, about these kinds of languages. With this list we could judge for ourselves how many of them were credible. We might all accept some, but some of us would judge others as being moderately or outrageously ill-founded and premature. -
Adamawa-Eastern
ADAMAWA-EASTERN WILLIAM J. SAMARIN1 INTRODUCTION In the very center of Africa lies a group of Niger-Congo languages separated from related languages in the west by a wedge of Benue-Congo languages that reaches northward from the Congo republics into the Central African Republic, the Cameroun Republic, and Nigeria. The group, taken to be a linguistic unit, a subphylum of Niger-Congo by Greenberg (1963), has an east-west distribution that reaches from the Cameroun to the Sudan and includes both the southeastern portion of the Chad and the northern portion of the Congo Republic (Kinshasa), with the Central African Republic representing most of its territorial expanse. This group of languages actually consists of at least two subgroups : Adamawa, located principally in the Cameroun (in the general area of the Adamawa mountains), but spilling over into the adjoining parts of Nigeria, the Chad, and the C.A.R. ; and Eastern, so-called because these languages once were considered to represent the eastern extension of Sudanic languages. Hence, Adamawa-Eastern.2 Murdock (1959) uses the term Eastern Nigritic instead, but his classification is not taken very seriously by linguists. The geographical distribution of these languages is for the most part uniform in the center but disperses at both the eastern and western ends. Thus affected are the Adamawa languages scattered in generally small pockets in Nigeria, the Cameroun, and the Chad. The Eastern languages, on the other hand, spread solidly from the eastern part of the Cameroun all the way through the C.A.R. This distribution is broken up in the Sudan, where Eastern languages are minority languages among Central Sudanic ones, and in the Congo, where the presence of Benue-Congo lan- 1 This study would have been impossible without the help of many who responded to a request for information about languages about which I knew nothing. -
The Gbeya Language
THE GBEYA LANGUAGE GRAMMAR, TEXTS, AND VOCABULARIES BY WILLIAM J. SAMARIN UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES 1966 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PUBLICATIONS IN LINGUISTICS Advisory Editors: W. E. Bull, W. L. Chafe, C. D. Chretien, M. B. Emeneau, M. R. Haas, Harry Hoijer, L. D. Newmark, D. L. Olmsted, R. P. Stockwell Volume 44 Approved for publication March 26, 1965 Issued August 17, 1966 Price $5.00 University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles California Cambridge University Press London, England Manufactured in the United States of America CONTENTS Introduction 1 Bibliography 8 Abbreviations and symbols H Maps 12 GRAMMAR 1. Phonology H 110. Primary phonemes 17 111. Consonant phonemes 11 111.1. Description of consonants 11 111.2. Distribution of consonants 26 112. Vowel phonemes 27 112.1. Description of vowels 27 112.2. Distribution of vowels 28 113. Tonal phonemes 29 120. Secondary phonemes 29 121. Nasalization 29 122. Juncture 30 123. Pause 30 123.1. Following hesitation 30 123.2. At syntactic boundaries 31 124. Terminal contours 31 124.1. Period contour 31 124.2. Question contour 31 124.3. Exclamation contour 31 124.4. Double-exclamation contour 32 130. Morphophonemics 32 131. Automatic alternations 32 131.1. Consonants 32 131.2. Tones 34 132. Morphological alternations 34 132.1. Consonants 34 132.2. Vowels 35 132.3. Tone and other alternations 36 133. Irregular alternations 37 133.1. Consonants 37 133.2. Vowels 37 133.3. /r/, /y/, and vowel lengthening 37 140. Extra-phonemic characteristics of the language 39 150. Assimilation of loan-words 40 [ v ] vi CONTENTS 2. -
Some Principles on the Use of Macro-Areas in Typological Comparison
Language Dynamics and Change 4 (2014) 167–187 brill.com/ldc Some Principles on the Use of Macro-Areas in Typological Comparison Harald Hammarström Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics & Centre for Language Studies, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, The Netherlands [email protected] Mark Donohue Department of Linguistics, Australian National University, Australia [email protected] Abstract While the notion of the ‘area’ or ‘Sprachbund’ has a long history in linguistics, with geographically-defined regions frequently cited as a useful means to explain typolog- ical distributions, the problem of delimiting areas has not been well addressed. Lists of general-purpose, largely independent ‘macro-areas’ (typically continent size) have been proposed as a step to rule out contact as an explanation for various large-scale linguistic phenomena. This squib points out some problems in some of the currently widely-used predetermined areas, those found in the World Atlas of Language Struc- tures (Haspelmath et al., 2005). Instead, we propose a principled division of the world’s landmasses into six macro-areas that arguably have better geographical independence properties. Keywords areality – macro-areas – typology – linguistic area 1 Areas and Areality The investigation of language according to area has a long tradition (dating to at least as early as Hervás y Panduro, 1971 [1799], who draws few historical © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi: 10.1163/22105832-00401001 168 hammarström and donohue conclusions, or Kopitar, 1829, who is more interested in historical inference), and is increasingly seen as just as relevant for understanding a language’s history as the investigation of its line of descent, as revealed through the application of the comparative method.