The project Breaking the Unwritten Language Barrier (BULB), which brings together linguists and computer scientists, aims at supporting linguists in documenting unwritten languages. In order to ...achieve this we develop tools tailored to the needs of documentary linguists by building upon technology and expertise from the area of natural language processing, most prominently automatic speech recognition and machine translation. As a development and test bed for this we have chosen three less-resourced African languages from the Bantu family: Basaa, Myene and Embosi. Work within the project is divided into three main steps:1)Collection of a large corpus of speech (100h per language) at a reasonable cost. For this we use standard mobile devices and a dedicated software—Lig-Aikuma. After initial recording, the data is re-spoken by a reference speaker to enhance the signal quality and orally translated into French.2)Automatic transcription of the Bantu languages at phoneme level and the French translation at word level. The recognized Bantu phonemes and French words will then be automatically aligned.3)Tool development. In close cooperation and discussion with the linguists, the speech and language technologists will design and implement tools that will support the linguists in their work, taking into account the linguists’ needs and technology's capabilities.
Abstract
This paper provides a diachronic construction-based explanation of the differential perfective marking conditioned by transitivity status in Western Mande languages, using the Greater ...Manding group as an exemplar case. This typologically unusual phenomenon has previously been erroneously cast in terms of case alignment, either synchronically (in terms of bidirectional case markers) or historically (in terms of an earlier split-ergative stage). The central insight of my explanation is that the Positive Perfective constructions of the Western Mande languages are multiple-source constructions. The in-depth reconstruction of these constructions presented in the paper provides a theoretically significant illustration of a pattern of repeated emergence of constructional competition in a particular semantic domain, which is subsequently resolved through constructional specialization and merger, resulting in multiple-source constructions and a typologically unusual pattern of differential TAM and polarity marking.
This paper provides a diachronic construction-based explanation of the differential perfective marking conditioned by transitivity status in Western Mande languages, using the Greater Manding group ...as an exemplar case. This typologically unusual phenomenon has previously been erroneously cast in terms of case alignment, either synchronically (in terms of bidirectional case markers) or historically (in terms of an earlier split-ergative stage). The central insight of my explanation is that the Positive Perfective constructions of the Western Mande languages are multiple-source constructions. The in-depth reconstruction of these constructions presented in the paper provides a theoretically significant illustration of a pattern of repeated emergence of constructional competition in a particular semantic domain, which is subsequently resolved through constructional specialization and merger, resulting in multiple-source constructions and a typologically unusual pattern of differential TAM and polarity marking.
As many other languages of northern sub-Saharan Africa, almost all Bobo and Samogo languages (two distantly related Mande groups) exhibit prominently clause-final negative markers (CFNMs), a ...cross-linguistically uncommon property. Unlike negators in other parts of the world, CFNMs in the area prove to be rather unstable diachronically and relatively easy to borrow, similar to discourse markers, focus particles and phasal adverbs, with which they also happen to share peculiarities of morphosyntax and paths of historical development. This article first provides an exhaustive overview of the data available on the use of CFNMs in these languages. Building on these data, I advance an account of the history of the default CFNMs in these languages. In particular, I argue that the default CFNMs of Jo, Seen and probably Kpeen (all Samogo) go back to the phasal adverbial *kè ‘(not) yet; still’, whereas the default CFNMs of Bobo and Dzuun, Ban and Kpaan ultimately go back to a phasal adverbial *kÚDà(C)á ‘(not) again’. However, the default CFNMs of Dzuun, Kpaan and Ban turn out to be only indirect reflexes resulting from a lateral transfer of the Bobo CFNM, which expanded an already rich system of semantically more specific CFNMs in these languages.
Several Mande languages, viz. Jula of Samatiguila, Ko Mende, Jowulu, Yaba Southern San, and Tura, have person–number agreement on clause linking markers whose primary function, etymologically and ...often also synchronically, is to introduce reported discourse. Interestingly, in some of these languages the controller is not necessarily the subject of the main clause. This kind of agreement, which as such is already typologically unusual, is even more remarkable in Mande, since Mande languages have very little morphosyntactic agreement of any kind. I argue that agreement on clause linking markers in Mande is due to the fusion of originally predicative quotatives with their pronominal subjects. The agreement with non-subject controllers is semantic in origin in that a non-subject controller is necessarily also the source of the reported discourse.
The book under review provides a thorough construction-oriented synchronic and diachronic investigation of quotative indexes in a representative sample of 39 African languages. The study is ...typologically and theoretically well-informed and offers a good of deal of thought-provoking findings and insightful generalizations of general interest, well beyond the Africanist readership whose attention the title may attract most. The book also contains a wealth of language-specific data and analyses, both synchronic and diachronic. These data and analyses will be relevant not only to the specialists in the respective languages and language families, who could profit a lot from the new perspective on the data they may already be familiar with, but also to a readership attentive to issues of cross-linguistic diversity and language change.
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