Wikisida, AF1211 V23 Typologi och språkliga strukturer i afrikanska språk: Lesson 5 Inflection & derivation

Wikisida
2022-10-28T07:28:27+02:00

In this lesson, we are going to practice more with morphological typology and how the morphology of a language makes use of inflection and derivation.

Therefore, I will not introduce more general literature, but we keep making use of these two:

A. From our main textbook - Velupillai: An introduction to linguistic typology

Chapter 5 Morphology

More specifically on morphology in African languages, chapter 4 Morphology in:

Childs, G. Tucker. 2003. Introduction to African Languages. John Benjamins Publishing Company. ProQuest Ebook Central

The linguistic question of the week also concerns this. Again, you need to find an African language. BUT this time; it needs to be a language you have not written about before. The questions to answer will be explained when you follow the link.

When you do this assignment: try to find new references, specifically focused articles (not reference grammars) on these specific topics. These can be book chapters in a volume, or journal articles. Follow this link to read more about how to find suitable articles.

B. When working on morphology, we need to practice more linguistic annotation = glossing = morpheme by morpheme translation

You can find more information on this at the following link. At the end of the page, there is a pfd that you can download and that might be helpful: https://www.christianlehmann.eu/ling/ling_meth/ling_description/representations/gloss/index.php

Glossing is very important to learn, to be able to present language examples in a way in which all linguists can understand without prior knowledge of the language. Therefore, this lesson includes a glossing exercise, but organized in a different way than the last one!

Here is another exercise from the internet (see link in document) if you want more practice.

C. As an example of verbal derivation, read the following paper (you can find it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20090922095026/http://www.african.gu.se:80/aa/contents.html )

Lodhi, Abdulaziz Y. 2002. Verbal extensions in Bantu (the case of Swahili and Nyamwezi). Africa & Asia 2:4-26