Appendix A: Narrative Texts
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
OVERVIEW OF GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURES OF NDUT: A CANGIN LANGUAGE OF SENEGAL by DANIEL RAY MORGAN Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTERS OF ARTS IN LINGUISTICS THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON August 1996 i OVERVIEW OF GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURES OF NDUT: A CANGIN LANGUAGE OF SENEGAL The members of the Committee approve the masters thesis of Daniel Ray Morgan Donald A. Burquest Supervising Professor _____________________________________________ Shin Ja Hwang ______________________________________________ Carol McKinney ______________________________________________ Copyright © by Daniel Ray Morgan 1996 All Rights Reserved ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The writing of this thesis would not have been completed without the help and encouragement of many people. I wish to thank my supervising professor, Don Burquest, whose constant encouragement as he guided me through the process kept me moving ahead and gave me confidence even when I had doubts. Shin Ja Hwang’s careful attention to detail and helpful comments did much to improve the final product and Carol McKinney graciously offered her time, encouragement and experience. Special appreciation is due my wife Marietta, and our children, Benjamin, Christoph, and Sara. Thank you for your patience and understanding, and for your prayers and support. Marietta deserves recognition for another contribution to this work as well: her field notes were better organized and often more useful to me than my own! Father Kofi Ron Lange came alongside to help with some mundane editing for a time, giving generously and cheerfully of his time, and having just completed his own thesis, could offer his empathy as well. It was a privilege to receive his help. To all the Ndut people who received us into their communities, welcomed us into their homes, overlooked our peculiarities and adopted us into their families: We offer our sincerest thanks for all you have given us. Special thanks to Maas Mbengue whose love for his language and the culture of his people has been evident in all his work; to Assane Diouf, for his friendship, and the many ways he helped us to understand and adapt to Ndut culture; and to Serigne Malik Thiombane and the elders of the village of Darou Alfa, for the invitation to live in the village. iii And to my ‘village mother’ Adama Samb: May you live to see your great grandchildren read and write Ndut! Special thanks go to Dr. Gabriel Gueye who gave generously of his time and expertise, and made available to me several crucial resources cited frequently in these pages. In addition to his own work on Ndut phonology and phonetics, Paula D’Alton’s dissertation on the closely related Palor was invaluable in understanding many similar and even identical structures in Ndut. Finally, may all honor be to God, the Creator and sustainer of all things whose grace sustained me through the prayers of many friends. July 3, 1996 iv ABSTRACT OVERVIEW OF GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURES OF NDUT: A CANGIN LANGUAGE OF SENEGAL Publication No.______ Daniel R. Morgan, M.A. The University of Texas at Arlington, 1996 Supervising Professor: Donald A. Burquest This paper provides an overview of some of the grammatical structures of Ndut, a Cangin language of the Atlantic branch of the Niger-Congo language family. As several processes operate to obscure morphological boundaries, a brief description of the phonological system is presented. Insights from underspecification theory and feature geometry are applied to the analyses of the [ATR] based vowel harmony and two assimilation processes. Normal word order in simple clauses is SVO, but where a verbal auxiliary and a main verb are present, pronominal objects occur between the two verb forms. Postposed noun class markers, the associative marker, and the three term deictic-demonstrative system are also considered. The verbal inflectional and derivational suffixes and auxiliaries that make up the verb phrase are presented. Three types of subordination are also examined. v Subject-verb word order inversion is observed in certain adverbial and relative clauses. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.........................................................................................................III ABSTRACT.............................................................................................................................V LIST OF FIGURES..................................................................................................................X LIST OF TABLES...................................................................................................................XI ABBREVIATIONS.................................................................................................................XII CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION..............................................................................................1 1.1 Present situation and history of the language group...................................................1 1.2 Language classification................................................................................................2 1.3 Survey of previously published research.....................................................................6 1.4 Research and data corpus............................................................................................7 1.5 Description of Texts.....................................................................................................9 1.6 Organization of the Thesis.........................................................................................11 CHAPTER 2: PHONOLOGY.................................................................................................13 2.1 Consonants................................................................................................................13 2.2 Vowels ......................................................................................................................14 2.3 Vowel harmony.........................................................................................................15 2.4 Syllable structure and sandhi....................................................................................16 2.4.1 Syllable structure.................................................................................................16 2.4.2 Sandhi.................................................................................................................17 2.5 Stress.........................................................................................................................19 2.6 Assimilation processes...............................................................................................20 2.7 Conclusion.................................................................................................................24 CHAPTER 3: NOMINAL SYNTAX AND MORPHOLOGY......................................................25 3.1 Clause structure.........................................................................................................25 3.1.1 Case marking in Ndut..........................................................................................25 3.1.2 Word order in the clause.....................................................................................32 3.2 The noun class system...............................................................................................37 3.2.1 Class 1: ɓ- Personal............................................................................................39 3.2.2 Class 2: -Ø...........................................................................................................40 3.2.3 Class 3: f-.............................................................................................................41 vii 3.2.4 Class 4: k-............................................................................................................42 3.2.5 Class 5: m-..........................................................................................................42 3.2.6 Class 6: Plural......................................................................................................43 3.3 The noun phrase........................................................................................................45 3.3.1 Constituent order in the noun phrase..................................................................45 3.4 Deictic system............................................................................................................55 3.4.1 The demonstrative pronouns...............................................................................59 3.4.2 The demonstrative nominals...............................................................................63 3.4.3 The manner and locative adverbs.......................................................................66 3.4.4 The locative determiner suffixes.........................................................................71 3.4.6 Temporal deixis...................................................................................................73 3.5 The prepositional phrase...........................................................................................77 3.6 Numerical system......................................................................................................80 3.7 Conclusion.................................................................................................................81