Wikisida, AF1211 V23 Typologi och språkliga strukturer i afrikanska språk: Finding an article

Wikisida
2022-10-28T07:28:28+02:00

How to find an article:

What follows is an example, illustrating how you can go about finding a specific article. There are many more ways of finding articles, notably by reading about them in another article... So you just need somewhere to start!

For a seminar, or just out of interest, you read chapter 6 in Velupillai ‘Nominal categories and syntax’. When you read, you become interested in the fact that languages code things differently in the grammar depending on whether the noun governing agreement is animate or not. This is relevant for the language or language family that you are interested in. Now; through general work such as this text book, or any of the references cited therein (including https://wals.info/), you can look for an article which discusses the topic you’re interested in. For language or language specific articles, this is a useful source: https://glottolog.org/

Vellupilai lists Corbett 2011b, which is chapter 31 in Wals: Sex-based and non-sex-based gender systems. Here you can read, that all non-sex-based systems are based on some kind of animacy. Since you are interested in the Bantu language family, you find that Wald 1975 is a reliable source on this. This source is a bit old, so you would like to find something newer. Go to https://scholar.google.com/

Fill in the name of the source (Wald, Benji. 1975. Animate Concord in Northeast Coastal Bantu: its Linguistic and Social Implications as a Case of Grammatical Convergence).

In the search results, you can click on ‘cited by’ (‘citerat av’ in my picture), there are 40+ hits.

In that list, you can further narrow down your search (e.g. type ‘Bantu’). You find the following article:

Hyman, Larry M., Florian Lionnet, and Christophère Ngolele. “Number and animacy in the Teke noun class system.” African linguistics across the disciplines (2019): 89.

This is the article you decide to read, in order to find out about the nominal categories of Teke.