Wikisida, AF1211 V23 Typologi och språkliga strukturer i afrikanska språk: Lesson 1 Introduction

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

Welcome to the first lesson of African language structures and typology!

I'm looking forward to going through the different aspects of language with you, with focus on African languages but with examples from all over the world. You will find all information on what you need to do here on Canvas. For the schedule, see the Home page. The Zoom link we use can be found in the course guide.

First of all, make sure that you have:

Read the course guide including the course requirements.

Read the course outline, noted important dates and seen the overview in Modules (left column)

Is it all clear? Otherwise, let's set things straight here.

When you are done with that, let's introduce the topic of this lesson!

The focus of this course is on typology. This will be introduced here, together with other kinds of language classification. After this lesson, you should have a good idea of the answers to the following questions & topics:

how do linguists get their data?

the work of the descriptive linguist; the historical-comparative linguist and the typologist

how to read linguistic examples

In each lesson, the readings and exercises are listed in the order I think you should do them, but of course it's up to you. Go through the following text carefully and make sure you have done everything listed. When there's a link, this leads to a sub-page, generally an exercise or discussion. It may look like a lot, but don't forget; in this course you have 2 weeks for every lesson, and this amounts to 20 hours of course work.

Read & practice:

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

Chapter 1 Introduction

Important from this chapter: morpheme-by-morpheme translation, called glossing. Read the rules for this at: https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php (you can download a pdf here, for future reference).

Do the following exercise, and try to solve it together. Post your suggested solution, discuss the abbreviations you would use, and ask questions, in this forum. NB this is obligatory. When you have written in the forum, you will get a 'complete' for this assignment. Meaning, your ideas about the glossing do not necessarily have to be right.

Study questions chapter 1

B. Chapter 2 Typology and universals

This chapter introduces typology but there are other kinds of classifications. An important one is genealogical affiliation. Here, we will deepen our knowledge of one important African language family - Bantu.

Study questions chapter 2

The following literature illustrates historical comparative studies:

Read: Bostoen, Koen. 2019. Reconstructing Proto-Bantu. In Gérard Philippson, Koen Bostoen, Derek Nurse and Mark Van De Velde (eds): The Bantu languages, 308-334: Routledge.

C. Chapter 3 Methodology

Here, you can learn the basics of typological methods. Typologists rely on description and documentation of languages, as Velupillai also points out. This is the kind of work several of us at the subject of African languages carry out on a regular basis. I will tell you more on descriptive fieldwork when we meet and we will discuss the ethics of this. Read section 3 of my paper, which illustrates possible methodologies in fieldwork (you are of course free to read the whole paper on variation in Xhosa!)

For each lesson, you need to discuss a question relating to the literature (see the course guide), with details regarding a linguistic category from a language of your choice! The question of this lesson can be found here.

Study questions chapter 3

Extra reading and a good chapter to come back to every now and then when you want to check something:

Hammarström, Harald. 2018. A survey of African languages, 1-57. Berlin, Boston: Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.