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Verb Chains in Nizaa

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Verb Chains in Nizaa Verb chains in Nizaa Bjørghild Kjelsvik Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Cand. Philol. Department of Linguistics University of Oslo Oslo November 2002 II Verb chains in Nizaa Bjørghild Kjelsvik Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Cand. Philol. Department of Linguistics University of Oslo Oslo 5th November 2002 IV TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 INTRODUCTION 3 1.1 THE NIZAA LANGUAGE 3 1.2 STRUCTURE OF THE THESIS: 3 1.2.1 THE MAIN POINTS OF THE THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND HOW IT IS USED: 3 1.3 THE CORPUS 4 1.3.1 THE FORMALISM OF THE EXAMPLES 5 1.3.2 OTHER FORMALISMS: 6 1.3.3 ABBREVIATIONS 7 1.4 ON THE TEXTS 7 2 A SHORT OVERVIEW OF NIZAA GRAMMAR 9 2.1 PHONOLOGY 9 2.1.1 SYLLABLE-STRUCTURE 9 2.1.2 VOWELS 9 2.1.3 CONSONANTS 10 2.1.4 MORPHOPHONOLOGY 11 2.1.5 TONES 12 2.2 WORD ORDER AND SENTENCE TYPES. 13 2.3 NOUNS 17 2.4 PRONOUNS 18 2.5 VERBS AND VERB MORPHOLOGY 18 2.5.1 VERBAL DERIVATIONS 18 2.5.2 INFLECTIONS: 20 3 MULTIPLE VERBS IN NIZAA CLAUSES 22 3.1 FORMAL CHARACTERISTICS 22 3.2 FREQUENCIES 23 3.2.1 COMMENTS ON THE TABLES: 26 3.3 DISTRIBUTION PATTERNS IN 2-VERB CHAINS 27 3.3.1 COMMENTS ON THE DISTRIBUTION PATTERN TABLES: 30 3.4 SERIAL VERBS 30 3.4.1 NIZAA CHAINS - SERIAL VERBS OR COMPOUNDS? 31 I TABLE OF CONTENTS 4 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK OF THE THESIS 34 4.1 EVENT INTEGRATION 34 4.1.1 MACRO-EVENT, FRAMING EVENT AND CO-EVENT 35 4.1.2 THE FRAMING EVENT 36 4.1.3 THE CO-EVENT 39 4.2 FRAMING EVENTS IN A TYPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE 41 4.2.1 SATELLITES 41 4.2.2 SATELLITE-FRAMED AND VERB- FRAMED LANGUAGES 42 4.2.3 ILLUSTRATION OF THE TWO TYPES 43 4.3 LEXICALISATION AND CONSTRUCTION; SYNTACTIC CONSIDERATIONS 45 4.3.1 LEXICALISATION PATTERNS 45 4.3.2 SYNTAX 47 4.3.3 PATTERNS LICENSING GENERIC VERBS AND PLEONASTIC CONSTRUCTIONS 48 4.4 SUMMARY 48 5 APPLYING THE THEORY 52 5.1 MACRO-EVENTS AND VERB CHAINS 52 5.2 ICONICITY AND ECONOMY 53 5.2.1 ICONICITY 53 5.2.2 ECONOMY 54 5.3 BACKGROUNDING IN THE VERBAL COMPLEX 55 5.4 EVENT SEMANTICS AND MOTION 56 5.4.1 SEMANTIC ‘BUILDING-BLOCKS’ 56 5.4.2 NIZAA 57 5.5 HYPOTHESES 60 6 ANALYSIS OF THE 2-VERB CHAINS 63 6.1 MOTION AS FRAMING EVENT 63 6.1.1 PRECURSION 64 6.1.2 ENABLEMENT 65 6.1.3 CAUSE AND MANNER 66 6.1.4 CONCOMITANCE 73 6.1.5 CONCURRENT RESULT 73 II TABLE OF CONTENTS 6.1.6 SUBSEQUENCE 73 6.1.7 CONSTITUTIVENESS 75 6.1.8 CHAINS WITH TWO MOTION-VERBS 76 6.1.9 SUMMARY OF MOTION AS FRAMING EVENT 81 6.2 TEMPORAL CONTOURING AS FRAMING EVENT 81 6.2.1 ‘TO BEGIN DOING’ 83 6.2.2 ‘TO STAY DOING’ 85 6.2.3 ‘TO FINISH DOING’ 86 6.2.4 ‘TO RETURN TO DOING’ 87 6.2.5 SUMMARY OF TEMPORAL CONTOURING AS FRAMING EVENT 89 6.3 STATE CHANGE AS FRAMING EVENT 89 6.3.1 PRECURSION 91 6.3.2 ENABLEMENT 91 6.3.3 CAUSE 92 6.3.4 MANNER 95 6.3.5 CONCOMITANCE 96 6.3.6 SUBSEQUENCE 97 6.3.7 CONSTITUTIVENESS 98 6.3.8 SUMMARY OF STATE CHANGE AS FRAMING EVENT 100 6.4 ACTION CORRELATING 100 6.4.1 COMITATIVE WITH X£û£ûØ ‘BE.TOGETHER’ 102 6.4.2 DATIVE WITH MH ‘GIVE’ 104 6.4.3 OTHER ACTION CORRELATING VERBS 109 6.4.4 SUMMARY OF ACTION CORRELATING AS FRAMING EVENT 112 6.5 REALIZATION 113 6.5.1 SUMMARY OF REALIZATION AS FRAMING EVENT 118 6.6 SUMMARY OF TWO-VERB CHAINS 118 7 ANALYSIS OF 3-AND 4- VERB CHAINS 121 7.1 FREQUENCIES AND DISTRIBUTION PATTERNS 121 7.1.1 DISTRIBUTION PATTERNS IN 3- AND 4-VERB CHAINS 121 7.2 THREE-VERB CHAINS 123 7.2.1 MOTION 124 7.2.2 STATE CHANGE 128 7.2.3 ACTION CORRELATING 129 7.3 FOUR-VERB CHAINS 135 III TABLE OF CONTENTS 7.4 SUMMARY OF 3- AND 4-VERB CHAINS 137 8 CONCLUSIONS 138 8.1 MACRO-EVENTS IN VERB CHAINS 138 8.1.1 FRAMING EVENTS AND CO-EVENTS 138 8.1.2 THE ‘STORY-LINE’ CONNECTION 139 8.1.3 THE CHAINS AND BACKGROUNDING 140 8.1.4 FURTHER COMMENTS ON THE FRAMING EVENT TYPES 140 8.2 GRAMMATICALIZATION ISSUES 141 8.3 VERB-FRAMED OR SATELLITE-FRAMED? 143 IV ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I first arrived in Cameroon in 1992, coming to work with the Nizaa language in a language project directed by the Eglise Evangélique Lutherienne du Cameroun. This African church has long traditions of work in local languages, together with several mission society partners such as The Norwegian Mission Society, the American Lutheran Church, Lutheran Bible Translators and the SIL. From 1993 the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation has been funding much of the work. The next 7 years, then, I was busily occupied with creating primers and reading material, publishing story collections and health booklets, and getting started on a translation of the New Testament. When my term was over, it felt necessary to reflect somewhat more profoundly on the structures of this language, and so I started on the process that has lead to the present thesis. It has been a most rewarding experience to finally have time for thinking through some of the data that I had gathered during my stay in Cameroon. Needless to say, this thesis would never have come about without the efforts of several other people. I would like to thank first of all my collaborators and friends in the Littérature Nizaa. Without their patience, I would never have learned Nizaa, and without their faithful work there would not have been any of written material now existing in this formerly oral language. Each of them contributed in their own way, and I thank each of them : Hamadicko Daniel and Bouba Jean, both active in translation, Patouma Sambo Jacqueline and Doudou Marie, doing secretary work and literacy classes, and Baba Pierre, also literacy work. Furthermore, I must thank my knowledgeable and always patient supervisor, Rolf Theil Endresen. He is in this case a ‘first mover’ in a very real sense of the word: it was he who first analysed the Nizaa language and created its alphabet. It has been a most gratifying experience to have him as supervisor, both because of his extensive familiarity with African and general linguistics, his knowledge of Nizaa, and his love of language that makes him take interest in the most minute details of his students work. I have also been so lucky as to have had a great group of fellow students around me. It is a great boon to have people actively working in different fields of linguistics around, when working on such a project! Thanks to you all, for discussions, conversations and jokes, and everything else you have contributed with! Finally I must thank my husband Hjalmar, and Martha Joy, Iselin and Per Arne for their support and for much patience during the writing process. Without their willingness to take care of the running chores of the household, things would have been quite more unpleasant. Bjørghild Kjelsvik 1 2 INTRODUCTION 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 The Nizaa language About 10.000 people in Cameroun speak the Nizaa language. They live for the most part in and around Galim, a village of some 2000 inhabitants in the Faro et Deo Departement of the Adamaoua province. The area may cover about 100 km2, stretching eastward from the Nigerian border. Cameroun is truly a conglomorate of langauges (about 250) and so several other languages are spoken in the same area, notably Fula (Foulfoulde) and Haussa, but also Mbum, Tchamba (Samba), Gbaya, Pere and others. Most Nizaa speakers know Fula in addition to their own language, since it is the prevalent lingua franca of northern Cameroun. As for the genetic classification of Nizaa, we base ourselves on Endresen 1990/91 and 1992. In these articles he comprehensively evaluates the different classifications made, and refute them as not being founded on well-established comparative methods of classification. Endresen 1990/91 reconstructs earlier stages of Nizaa and shows regular correspondences with proto-Bantu forms. From this treatment it is clear that Nizaa belongs to a Bantoïd sub-branch of the Benue-Congo branch of the Niger-Congo family, but otherwise it is not satisfactorily accounted for. 1.2 Structure of the thesis: In this thesis we shall work with a particular structure of multiple verbs in Nizaa, called verb chains. We will show in chapter 1 that such complex predicates are frequently used in Nizaa, covering about 34 % of the total occurrences of clauses with verbs in the corpus. Chapter 2 describes the frequency of the different verbs in the corpus and groups them according to distributional patterns. A theory of complex events is presented in chapter 4 and further expanded and applied to Nizaa in chapter 5. In the two following chapters, 6 and 7, we then will examine Nizaa verb complexes from the point of view of this theoretical framework of complex event, before concluding on the finds in chapter 8. Appendix A give whole-sentence versions of all the language examples, and Appendix B lists the different types of complex predicates of the corpus.
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