Bøger i Schriften Zur Afrikanistik - Research in African Studies serien

This study adopts a holistic approach to language documentation and description. Drawing on a corpus of synchronic data collected during fieldwork and guided by Basic Linguistic Theory, it explores topics in Kusaal grammar including phonology, noun classes and relator nouns, phrases and clauses as well as the structuring of pragmatic information.

Ethnicity and Language Variation

This publication describes the usage of languages in the multilingual society of Ethiopia. It is based on empirical studies conducted in nine states of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia in 1997 and 1998. A research team of German and Ethiopian scholars surveyed about 3,500 high school students from 35 Ethiopian towns regarding their language behaviour. The data on the distribution of mother tongues and second languages are published here for the first time and are representative for a typical Ethiopian town. These data outline the development of multilingualism over three generations (students/parents/grandparents) and elucidate factors which promote the spread of multilingualism. The frame for the representation and explanation of the data is an adapted model of the social network theory.

This study is an investigation into the comparative phonology and lexicon of six barely-known Bantu varieties spoken in Kenya. In a dialectological approach a new classification of Imenti, Igoji, Tharaka, Mwimbi, Muthambi and Chuka is developed. From the data, isoglosses and similarities concerning morpho-phonological processes are drawn.

L¿objectif principal de ce travail est d¿analyser la transitivité telle qüelle se manifeste en seereer. Le seereer est l¿une des principales langues du Sénégal. Elle appartient au phylum Niger-Congo et est classée dans la branche nord de la famille atlantique. La majeure partie des données a été collectée à travers l¿enregistrement de séances d¿élicitations, de contes, de récits, de poèmes chantés et d¿interviews ainsi que le recueil de textes. Ce livre décrit les structures intransitives, monotransitives et ditransitives. Il traite également l¿ambitransitivité, les prédicats verbaux semi-transitifs ainsi que les relations qüentretient la transitivité avec la valence et la dérivation. Le travail exploite aussi l¿influence de certains paramètres sémantiques sur la transitivité. A travers les différents chapitres abordés, l¿étude a révélé l¿importance des traits syntaxiques surtout et certaines propriétés sémantiques dans la transitivité en seereer.

This book contains a concise reconstruction of lexical and phonological proto-forms for various stages in the development of Cushitic languages, the largest branch within the Afro-Asiatic phylum. It is based on the comparative method of historical linguistics, using sound correspondences as major device for the identification of cognates.