Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus
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Penultimate lengthening in isiNdebele: A system and its variations
Full text linkLengthening of the penultimate syllable in a word, phrase, or utterance is common across Bantu languages, especially in Eastern and Southern Bantu languages. Despite the prevalence of the general phenomenon, there is significant cross-linguistic diversity in how PUL is instantiated. The aim of this paper is to describe the PUL patterns and variation in isiNdebele, a Nguni language spoken in South Africa. IsiNdebele is closely related to Zulu and frequently spoken in situations of intense contact with Zulu, but its realisation of penultimate lengthening nevertheless shows important differences from what has been reported for Zulu and other Nguni languages. In addition, penultimate lengthening in isiNdebele shows significant internal variation, both across speakers and across utterances produced by the same speaker. This variation has implications for both phonological and syntactic analyses of this language: Many studies of phonological phrasing in other Nguni languages use penultimate length as the main phonetic cue for phrase boundaries, but a strict correlation between PUL and phrasing cannot be confirmed for isiNdebele. Lengthening also depends on factors such as speech rate, emphasis, and careful vs. casual speech
Melodic High Tones in Emihavani
Full text linkEmihavani is a Bantu language spoken in southeastern Malawi. It is a dialect of Emakhuwa, a languagewhose origins lie in Nampula Province in northern Mozambique, but whose speakers have migrated into bothsouthern Tanzania and southeastern Malawi. It is important to note that all of the regions where Emakhuwa dialects are spoken are economically under-developed, and a consequence of this is that the language, despite being spoken by several million people, is one of the poorer documented major Bantu languages (cf. Guérois 2015, Katupha 1983, 1991, Kisseberth 2003, Kisseberth & Guérois 2014, Stucky 1985, Van der Wal 2009).The present paper starts to remedy this situation for Emihavani by providing an account of the mostcomplicated aspect of the Emihavani tonal system: the “melodic High tone†patterns that operate in the verbalsystem. In order to document these tone patterns, we will necessarily have to provide a brief discussion of several aspects of Emihavani phonology and morphology. We should emphasize that all of the material in this paper derives from our intensive research on Emihavani that began in 2017. All of the data reflects the speech of Alfred Lihelu, a native speaker who has been part of all the significant research on Emihavani in the past few years (e.g. the translation and recording of the New Testament in 2014 by the Bible Society of Malawi). Although our focus is definitely on Emihavani, we also seek to place Emihavani in its proper Emakhuwa context. All references to other Emakhuwa dialects derive from the first-named author’s research over more than four decades
The rise and fall of Serial Verb Constructions: Preamble
Full text linkThis is a brief introduction to the special issue of Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus. We present the concept of serial verb constructions (SVCs) conventionally understood as monoclausal sequences of verbs without any overt marker of coordination, subordination, or syntactic dependency. We then focus on the mechanisms at work in the evolution of serial verb constructions, and the investigations of their origin and demise. We introduce the prototype approach to the category of SVCs as the basis of the study of verb serialization throughout the volume and discuss the research strategies applicable to the development of serial verbs in individual languages. The concluding section offers an overview of the volume
The earliest Serial Verb Constructions in Aramaic? Verb-verb constructions with hlk ‘go’ and ʔth ‘come’ in Old Aramaic
Full text linkThis paper presents examples in which hlk ‘walk, go’ and ʔth ‘come’ appear in multi-verb constructions conforming to the definition of asymmetrical serial verb constructions (SVCs). In these constructions, hlk and ʔth do not appear to be used with their concrete lexical senses as verbs constituting the predicate of a separate clause. Rather, they are found in the V1 position and appear to be used as minor verbs contributing an aspectual nuance of immediacy to the major verb in the V2 position. Broader usage of these verbal forms in Old Aramaic and cognate languages is consistent with a source of such SVCs from the fusion of bi-clausal constructions
On the rise: The expansion of Serial Verb Constructions in Tariana
Full text linkThe emergence and the expansion of serial verbs can be affected by language contact. This paper focuses on a case study from Tariana, a highly endangered Arawak language spoken in the multilingual Vaupés River Basin Linguistic Area in Brazilian Amazonia. Tariana has numerous types of asymmetrical and symmetrical serial verbs highly frequent in discourse of all genres. Two kinds of serial verbs are on the rise. A construction involving a prefixed form -siwa with an emphatic, reciprocal, sociative, and reflexive meaning is developing into a serial verb construction. The motivation for this development lies in intensive language contact with the unrelated Tukano, now the major language in use by the extant speakers of Tariana, where reflexive and reciprocal meanings are expressed through serial verbs. The integration of recapitulating verb sequences with the verb -ni ‘do, make’ into the system of serial verbs is indirectly linked to the impact of Tucano where the verb meaning ‘do, make’ is used as a recapitulating device in bridging linkage. The development of recapitulating serial verbs in Tariana can be partly seen as an independent innovation, and as an outcome of language-internal pressure to create further serial verbs, expanding and extending the productive and much-deployed mechanism in the language
A sign of The Times: an APPRAISAL analysis of the imagined community’s bonding in letters to a South African newspaper
Full text linkThis article investigates how writers to The Times, formerly a daily national newspaper, used APPRAISAL strategies in letters to the editor to form the bonds that unified an imagined community of readership. The couplings of interpersonal and ideational meaning around which the community affiliated are revealed by an APPRAISAL analysis. Conclusions drawn from this information indicate the nature of the imagined community in terms of how the members viewed their agency, and the cohesion of the group. Main findings show that the community affiliated around evaluations of South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), and its leader at the time, Jacob Zuma, but did so very differently. The Times’ writers also tended to be individualistic and did not rely on other community members to solve the problems they identified
The rise of the WZIĄĆ (TAKE) Serial Verb Construction in Polish
Full text linkThe present study is dedicated to the emergence of an asymmetrical serial verb construction (SVC) with the verb wziąć in Polish. By making use of a dynamic prototype-driven approach to linguistic categorization and by reviewing the historical corpora that range from the first Old Polish texts in the 14th c. until the end of the New Polish period in 1939, the authors conclude that the wziąć SVC has resulted from the fusion of the original conjunctively coordinated (CC) clauses. Although two types of clause-fusion mechanisms have operated during the grammaticalization of the wziąć SVCs, their contribution to this process has been dissimilar. The evolution from the syndetic CC with the coordinator i to the wziąć SVC via a pseudo-coordinated (PC) stage (i.e., the wziąć-i PC) has constituted a faster and stronger drift, while the more direct evolution originating in the asyndetic CC with wziąć has been slower and less pervasive
Russian constructions with ‘take’ expressing an unexpected event: Their historical origin and development in the 19th century
Full text linkThis study aims at elucidating the rise and expansion of four competing Russian constructions expressing the unexpectedness of an event. Тhree of them are built according to the pseudo-coordinative model ‘take and do’ and one follows the serial model ‘take do’. The historical data stemming from the Russian national corpus and covering the whole 19th century reveals striking differences between these constructions in terms of frequency and grammaticalisation, the most peripheral being the serial model. Evidence for ongoing grammaticalisation is mainly based on the rise of non-canonical second verbs denoting an uncontrollable event and inanimate subjects. Special attention will be given to the meanings of the imperative and contextually bound pragmatic effects
The role of vowel length and pitch in Xhosa sentence type intonation
Full text linkThis paper is a first study of intonation across different sentence types in Xhosa. A recent increase in intonation research of African languages, including Bantu, has shown that intonation involves the manipulation of several distinct prosodic features such as vowel length and voice, next to pitch (Downing and Rialland 2017a). Xhosa is a tonal language as many other African languages, meaning that the use of pitch for intonational purposes interacts with the use of lexical and grammatical tone. Moreover, other means are employed than pitch rise to distinguish different intonational phrases. For example, previous research shows that polar questions in Xhosa are indicated by reducing the lengthening of the penultimate vowel of a phrase, which is long in declaratives (Jones 2001). This paper expands on such previous studies and includes the intonation of different kinds of questions and focus constructions in order to sketch a more complete picture of Xhosa intonation. It shows that the manipulation of penultimate lengthening plays an important role in distinguishing different phrases, in combination with declination and final lowering of pitch. Also, devoicing the last vowel to a whisper indicates end of the intonation phrase. Understanding the interaction of tone, intonation and phonological phrasing is important for understanding the grammatical structure and discourse pragmatics of Bantu languages
Tone in Runyankore Verb Stem Reduplication
Full text linkIn this paper I describe the surprisingly extensive range of choices Runyankore speakers have in “devaluative-frequentative†verb stem reduplication (“to sort of do X, to do X here and there, to do X a lotâ€). Analyzed as stem-compounding, both single (stem1-stem2) and multiple (stem1-stem2-stem3...) reduplication are possible of a stem such as furumuka “dash out†(furumuka-furumuka(-furumuka...)), with the possibility of left-aligned truncation (furu-furumuka, furumu-furumuka), right-aligned truncation (furumuka-muka, furumuka-rumuka) and both (furu-furumuka-muka). In addition, prefinal stems can alternatively end in “replacive [a]†(fura-furumuka, furuma-furumuka). Complementing these variants is a “mixed†system where both stems are truncated (furumu-rumuka), to which additional reduplicated stems can also be added (furu-furumu-rumuka-muka). While each reduplicated stem is free to choose its shape independently of the others (e.g. furu-furuma-furumuka, furuma-furu-furumuka etc.), the same three possible H(igh) stem-tone patterns are observed in different inflections, predictable from the input tones: /H/ on the first stem, /H/ on the last stem, /H/ on the second mora of any stem (au choix). I show that these facts require each stem to be independently derived from the same (complete) morphological and phonological input with tone assigned prior to truncation, thereby directly supporting both reduplication as compounding (Downing 2003) and morphological doubling theory (MDT) (Inkelas & Zoll 2005)