Langage, langues et cultures d'Afrique

The chapter on nominal morphology and syntax provides an analysis of the Bantu noun phrase. An overview of the well-known characteristics of the noun class system is complemented by an original analysis of their semantics as evidenced in agreement phenomena. The chapter also provides the first comparative study of the distribution and origin of the so-called augment since the early 1970s. An overview of the major adnominal modifiers is followed by an analysis of the noun phrase that describes and explains the typologically highly unusual word order patterns found in the Bantu noun phrase.

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Advances in computer-assisted linguistic research have been greatly influential in reshaping linguistic research. With the increasing availability of interconnected datasets created and curated by researchers, more and more interwoven questions can now be investigated. Such advances, however, are bringing high requirements in terms of rigorousness for preparing and curating datasets. Here we present CLICS, a Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications (CLICS). CLICS tackles interconnected interdisciplinary research questions about the colexification of words across semantic categories in the world's languages, and show-cases best practices for preparing data for cross-linguistic research. This is done by addressing shortcomings of an earlier version of the database, CLICS2, and by supplying an updated version with CLICS3, which massively increases the size and scope of the project. We provide tools and guidelines for this purpose and discuss insights resulting from organizing student tasks for database updates.

International audience

Space is presently the focus of much research and debate across disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy. One strong feature of this collection is to bring together theoretical and empirical contributions from these varied scientific traditions, with the collective aim of addressing fundamental questions at the forefront of the current literature: the nature of space in language, the linguistic relativity of space, the relation between spatial language and cognition. Linguistic analyses highlight the multidimensional and heterogeneous nature of space, while also showing the existence of a set of types, parameters, and principles organizing the considerable diversity of linguistic systems and accounting for mechanisms of diachronic change. Findings concerning spatial perception and cognition suggest the existence of two distinct systems governing linguistic and non-linguistic representations, that only partially overlap in some pathologies, but they also show the strong impact of language-specific factors on the course of language acquisition and cognitive development.

This paper presents an overview of the formal markings characteristic of focus in Atlantic languages and reflection on some problematic uses of focused forms. A common (but not universal) feature of these languages is the use of verb morphology (in various ways) to express focus. What is most remarkable in several Atlantic languages (and apparently specific to this group) is that (1) verb forms indicate the syntactic status of the focused constituent; (2) these verb forms often merge focus, aspect, and voice features. This organization of the verb system has consequences for the range of uses of focused forms, in particular, for verb focus which is often used to express a mere statement in the case of verbs expressing a quality. These uses are accounted for through a renewed definition of the focused sentence as a “split assertion” involving a temporal presupposition and a qualitative designation.

While global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here, we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available. The comprehensiveness of Grambank allows us to quantify the relative effects of genealogical inheritance and geographic proximity on the structural diversity of the world's languages, evaluate constraints on linguistic diversity, and identify the world's most unusual languages. An analysis of the consequences of language loss reveals that the reduction in diversity will be strikingly uneven across the major linguistic regions of the world. Without sustained efforts to document and revitalize endangered languages, our linguistic window into human history, cognition, and culture will be seriously fragmented.

In recent years there has been an interest in the phenomenon of “Similar Place Avoidance” (SPA), particularly as concerns Arabic CCC radicals. Although little evidence has been considered outside Arabic, Hebrew, and perhaps Semitic in general, where roots with successive consonants sharing the same place of articulation are underrepresented, similarity avoidance has sometimes been hypothesized as a universal tendency. Progressively extending our scope from the Atlantic subgroup of Niger-Congo in its relation with other Niger-Congo languages, which had been our original, diachronic concern, to almost all of Africa and beyond, we undertook an extensive crosslinguistic investigation of SPA and found impressive support for this notion.

This chapter, entrenched in cognitive linguistics, proposes a multidimensional approach to the layering of the lexicon and its semantic organization, explicating the principles of variation and stabilization of lexical networks. Semantic variation is considered as inherent to language structure and driven by common universal cognitive mechanisms which are accounted for by a dynamic conception of meaning construal. Intra-linguistic plasticity of meaning echoes inter-linguistic variation. The discourse level is the seat of meaning construal mechanisms which contribute to the general polysemy of lexical units and to the stabilization of their meaning within a particular utterance. Units appear to be the seat of most variations, within and across languages, because meaning is construed in extremely varied ways according to common mechanisms.

This book is the result of a joint project on lexical and semantic typology which gathered together field linguists, semanticists, cognitivists, typologists, and an NLP specialist. These cross-linguistic studies concern semantic shifts at large, both synchronic and diachronic: the outcome of polysemy, heterosemy, or semantic change at the lexical level. The first part presents a comprehensive state of the art of a domain typologists have long been reluctant to deal with. Part two focuses on theoretical and methodological approaches: cognition, construction grammar, graph theory, semantic maps, and data bases. These studies deal with universals and variation across languages, illustrated with numerous examples from different semantic domains and different languages. Part three is dedicated to detailed empirical studies of a large sample of languages in a limited set of semantic fields. It reveals possible universals of semantic association, as well as areal and cultural tendencies.

It is generally assumed that all nouns belong to a gender in gender languages and that this constitutes a fundamental difference between gender systems and systems of noun classifiers. An analysis of gender and agreement in the Cameroonian Bantu language Eton challenges this assumption. Gender assignment cannot be predicted on semantic grounds in Eton, except for proper names and deictic kinship terms. Although these nouns trigger the same agreement pattern as nouns of gender 1, their behaviour differs too much from the other nouns for them to be analysed as gender 1 words. It is argued that they form the core of a set of genderless nouns. The agreement pattern they trigger is a multifunctional one: it marks agreement with gender 1 words and with genderless words. It will be shown that multifunctionality is a typical characteristic of agreement patterns in Bantu.

International audience

A Grammar of Eton is the first description of the Cameroonian Bantu language Eton. It is also one of the few complete descriptions of a North-western Bantu language. The complex tonology of Eton is carefully analysed and presented in a simple and consistent descriptive framework, which permits the reader to keep track of Eton's many tonal morphemes. Phonologists will be especially interested in the analysis of stem initial prominence, which manifests itself in a number of logically independent phenomena, including length of the onset consonant, phonotactic skewing and number of tonal attachment sites. Typologists and Africanists working on morphosyntax will find useful analyses of, among others, gender and agreement; tense, aspect, mood and negation; and verbal derivation. They will encounter many morphosyntactic differences between Eton and the better known Eastern and Southern Bantu languages, often due to evolutions shaped by maximality constraints on stems. The chapters on clause structure and complex constructions provide data hardly found in sources on the languages of the region, including descriptions of non-verbal clauses, focus, quasi-auxiliaries and adverbial clauses.

The role of deictic reference in Wolof is particularly interesting for two reasons.First, it permeates the entire system of the language (in noun determination, predication and subordination).Second, this language has a suffix which indicates the absence of localization in the space of the speaker -which plays a special role in the construction of various relationships of syntactic dependency.Thus, in Wolof reference depends on a dual mechanism of spatial anchoring: (1) in order to become definite, an object must necessarily be situated in the speaker's space (physically near or far); (2) if the object is indicated as not being localized in the speaker's space, it necessarily depends syntactically on another constituant indicating the situation in which it is validated.We propose to describe the various uses of these spatial suffixes as well as the specifically linguistic mechanisms that they bring to light, such as the links between deictic anchoring, predication and syntactical dependency, and more generally the central role played by the speech situation.

Abstract Cuwabo (Bantu P34, Mozambique) illustrates a relativization strategy, also attested in some North-Western and Central Bantu languages, whose most salient characteristics are that: (a) the initial agreement slot of the verb form does not express agreement with the subject (as in independent clauses), but agreement with the head noun; (b) the initial agreement slot of the verb form does not express agreement in person and number-gender (or class), but only in number-gender; (c) when a noun phrase other than the subject is relativized, the noun phrase encoded as the subject in the corresponding independent clause occurs in post-verbal position and does not control any agreement mechanism. In this article, we show that, in spite of the similarity between the relative verb forms of Cuwabo and the corresponding independent verb forms, and the impossibility of isolating a morphological element analyzable as a participial formative, the relative verb forms of Cuwabo are participles, with the following two particularities: they exhibit full contextual orientation, and they assign a specific grammatical role to the initial subject, whose encoding in relative clauses coincides neither with that of subjects of independent verb forms, nor with that of adnominal possessors.

L’auteur présente la conception gbaya du corps qui érige le foie comme unique organe des émotions et travaille plus précisément à l’étude de 16 noms et de 9 verbes l’expression des émotions. L’examen des différentes constructions prédicatives attestées pour exprimer les émotions montre que la présence d’un verbe à la voix active laisse au locuteur la possibilité de désigner un acteur qui en sera toujours le Sujet grammatical. Au contraire, l’emploi d’un verbe à la voix moyenne ou d’une phrase nominale présente la situation comme un constat sans ciblage possible d’un acteur, l’expérienceur et le stimulus ayant seulement un rôle d’actant neutre. Par contre l’affect, le locus et le verbe d’émotion sont spécialisés dans l’expression des émotions. Pour conclure, le gbaya propose une grande palette de possibles qui manifeste son organisation conceptuelle de ce domaine.

Clause-final negation markers (CFNMs), although typologically rare, can be found in a very wide range of languages of Northern Sub-Saharan Africa. Based on a sample of 618 African languages, this paper provides an analysis of spatio-temporal language dynamics in Sub-Saharan Africa with respect to the feature CFNM. I argue that it is important to consider together both the languages that have the feature under investigation and the languages that do not have it. Furthermore, in order to better capture the diversity of the languages that have CFNMs, I increase the degree of granularity of my data by taking into account two parameters, viz., obligatoriness of CFNMs and possible restrictions on the freedom to use CFNMs in different constructions. For spatial analysis and visualization, I use the methods of spatial interpolation and generalized additive modeling. Both methods converge on the need to distinguish two focal areas of the feature CFNM. The first one, the Central Focal Area, is the most prominent of the two and spans the east of West Africa and parts of Central Africa. The second one, the Western Focal Area, is less prominent and is restricted to West Africa. The two focal areas are separated by a major discontinuity around Ghana, Togo and Benin. In order to better calibrate the results of the spatial analysis and to identify the historical core of the Central Focal Area, I call onto other types of data available. Finally, I address the distribution of optional and/or restricted CFNMs in Africa, with a particular focus on the spread of CFNMs among Bantu languages to the south of the Central Focal Area, primarily in the Congo River corridor and the north of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Genetic and molecular investigations were carried out with Eurasian Drosophila melanogaster populations on the P-M system of hybrid dysgenesis. In 27 strains sampled from France to Middle Asia, a clear gradient exists between Western Europe, in which most modern strains are of the Q type, and eastern areas, in which M-cytotype strains predominate. Molecular analysis on individual flies was performed with two complementary probes of the cloned 2.9-kilobase P element. The results provide evidence for a gradually decreasing frequency of P elements from west to east, but the presence of P-homologous sequences has been ascertained in all of the wild M-cytotype populations analyzed. Moreover, some active P elements with GD sterility potential were revealed in the majority of M-cytotype populations when tested with a highly sensitive reference line. The gradual change in distribution of the polymorphic P family in Eurasia is discussed in relation to the structure of the elements together with the theories of P-M evolution and is interpreted as the present invasion of Eurasian populations by these elements.

This paper provides a descriptive analysis of the [ATR] vowel harmony system of Bondu-so (Dogon, Mali), a previously undocumented language. Data come from fieldwork and have not yet been published. While Bondu-so has seven surface vowels, namely, two [+ATR, +high] vowels ([i], [u]), a [–ATR +low] vowel [a] and a [±ATR] contrast in the mid vowels with front [e]/[ɛ] and back [o]/[ɔ], there is evidence for a more abstract vowel system phonologically consisting of ten vowels with [±ATR] contrasts with all vowel heights. Further, the language shows a three-way contrast with respect to the feature [ATR] on suffixal vowels: some suffixal vowels act as [+ATR] dominant, spreading their [+ATR] feature onto the root; other suffixes act as [–ATR] dominant, spreading [–ATR] onto the root, and still other suffixes have vowels unspecified for [ATR] receiving their [±ATR] feature by rightward spreading of the [±ATR] value of the root vowel. We offer an autosegmental analysis and then discuss the theoretical implications of such an analysis. These implications include the ternary use of [ATR], the issue of phonological versus morphological harmony, the relationship between vowel inventories and [ATR] harmony systems, and the question of abstractness in phonology.

Bondu-so (Dogon; Mali) vowel harmony exhibits both typologically and theoretically interesting properties. The language’s vocalic system displays surface patterns that implicate a ten-vowel system with an underlying [ATR] contrast at three vowel heights that is not immediately apparent given only mid vowels maintain an [ATR] contrast on the surface. The current paper presents previously unaccounted for data that show alternations associated with Bondu-so vowel harmony correlate not only with the [ATR] specification of a given root vowel, but also with properties of the root-final consonant. We appeal to a combination of featural and prosodic licensing to analyze these outcomes and do so in a modified version of the Parallel Structures Model of feature geometry. The PSM framework has been employed in studies of consonant assimilation and consonant-vowel interaction, but to our knowledge, the current paper is the first to extend it specifically to the analysis of vowel harmony.