University of KhartoumFaculty of ArtsDepartment of Linguistics

African Languages Typology

By, Ahmed Sosal A.December 2011

Seminars in Linguistics 503

Typology is the study of types. More specifically, it may refer to:

Typology (anthropology), division of culture by races Typology (archaeology), classification of things according

to their characteristics Typology (theology), in Christian theology, the interpretation

of some characters and stories in the Old Testament. Typology (urban planning and architecture), the taxonomic

classification of characteristics common to buildings or urban spaces

Linguistic typology, study and classification of languages according to their structural features

Typology, in psychology, a model of personality types Typology (creation biology)

What is typology?

Linguistic typology Linguistic typology is a subfield of linguistics that

studies and classifies languages according to their structural features. Its aim is to describe and explain the common properties and the structural diversity of the world's languages. It includes three sub-disciplines (Cysouw, M. 2005):

Qualitative typology, which deals with the issue of comparing languages and within-language variance;

Quantitative typology, which deals with the distribution of structural patterns in the world’s languages; and

Theoretical typology, which explains these distributions.

Typology aim is to account for the structural diversity of languages by classifying them into a small number of types. In such classifications, each language taken as a whole was considered as belonging to a particular language types also. But modern research stresses that typology must begin with the type of construction instead of the tradition of the types languages, Because of the differences in the types of structures according to differences in domains.

The aim of typology

There are set of morphosyntactic features which are going to central to our discussion because they are important for the typological classification of languages. All this is to give an overview of the structural diversity of African languages and to compare the structural diversity of African languages with that observed else where in the languages of the world.

The scope

Every natural language syntax consists of two major types of phrases: NPs and VPs.

Clauses result from the combination of variable number of noun phrases with verb where the verb (the predicate) assigns semantic roles to some of the noun phrases with which it combines (the arguments).

The syntactic relation between the verb and the nominal terms of a clause are universally originated according to a contrast ‘subject (S) / (direct) object (O) / obliques (X).

The genitive can be universally characterized as a NP with the function of noun modifier.

Some of the hypothesis which are adopted here are:

Subject/object case marking typology Subject/object indexation typology Voice

Subject/object indexation typology Most African languages have subject marker attached to the

verb form, and a number of them have also object marker. Example in Tswana language (Bantu, Niger-Congo) illustrates a situation in which the object marker included in the verb form.

Ki-χω –bi΄d-itse ‘I called you’SM.1S-OM.2S-called-ANT (how is it possible that you did not hear me?)

Subject/Object

Agreement morphemes: is the case in which subject and object markers may be obligatory.In Swahili definite objects (including pronouns and proper nouns) require an object marker, whereas indefinite objects need no object marker as attested in the following example:•u-me-leta chackula? ‘Have you brought (some) food?’SM.2S-ANT-bring CL7.food•u-me-ki-leta chackula? ‘Have you brought the food?’

SM.2S-ANT-OM.CL7-bring Cl7.food (which I told you to bring)

In a number of African languages subject marker differ from the corresponding object marker, at least in some persons. There are distinctions in the third person accoutered in languages in which identical distinctions are involved in the agreement between nouns and modifiers e.g. in Swati (Bantu, Niger-Congo)•in-dvodza len-dze i-yabaleka ‘The tall man is running away’

CL9-man CL9-tal SM.CL9-run•um-fana lomu-dze u-yabaleka ‘The tall boy is runing away’

CL1-boy CL1-tall SM.CL1-run

Passive can be assigned in relation to the following types: Mediopassive (middle) is a verb from that assign a ‘passive’ role to

their subject. It referred to by terms such as neuter that do no identify it as a voice at all. e.g. in Tswana language:

mai a-thub-eχ-i)le ‘the eggs broke’ cl6-.eggs sm.cl6-break-MEDAPASS

True passive forms don’t imply the existence of an agent triggering and/or controlling the process.

mai a-thub-il-w-e [kiŋwana] CL6.egg SM.CL6-break-ANT-PAS-ANT by CL1.child ‘The egg were broken (by the child)’

Voice

Presence vs. absence of verbal inflection Types of verbal inflection Auxiliaries Serial verbs Complex verb form reanalysis and syntactic change Serial verbs

They are types of complex predicate consist of a sequence of two or more verbs with the following three prosperities:

There is a single subject of the whole sequence. Each verb may have its own complement. The sequence as a whole has the behavior of a single predicate.An example of serial verb can be seen in Baule (Kwa, Niger-Congo) as followsa-fa i swǎ n a-kle mi-כ(he-ANT-take his house DEF ANT-show me‘He has shown me his house’

This found in Kwa languages (e.g. Ewe) and Benu-Congo languages (e.g. Yoruba).

The verb

Nominal classification Definiteness and referentiality Number Case affixes and adpositions The genitival modifier The adjectival modifier Definiteness and referentiality Definite articles are quite common in African languages and they are either originated

in demonstratives or in the third-person possessives. Indefinite articles originated in the numeral ‘one’ and attested in some African

languages. Languages with and without definite articles are encountered virtually in all language

families and in all parts of the African continent. Referential articles : there are some definite articles proper their use to include both

definite demonstration and non-definite referential uses called by Greenberg (1978) ‘stage II of definite articles’. They are common in Africa for example in Mandinka (Mande, Niger-Congo):

i ye kuluŋ-o je ‘they saw a/the boat’ they PERF boat-DEF see

The structure of noun phrases

In a number of African languages ‘stage II articles’ manifest themselves only through a change or at the end of the word they are attached to as shown in the following table:

Language indefinite definite meaning

Swati sitiba Siiba ‘well’

Zulu sizeba i-siziba (< i-sizi a)

Kita Maninka basa basa

Gambian Madinka basa baso(< basa-o) ‘Lizard’

Definite Article are ‘phrasal affixes’ attached to the first or to the last word of the noun phrase such as in Mandinka the definite form of ‘woman’ is muso:) (<musu-o), but ‘the/a one-eyed woman’ is musu nya: -kiliŋ–o, literally ‘woman eye-one-the’. Whereas in Arabic only definite article really affixed to nouns and with agreement in definiteness between noun and the adjectival modifiers as in al-baytu l-kabi:ru ‘The big house’The-house the-big

Variations affecting the function of a noun phrase in larger constructions in which they are included may bring into play three types of morphemes:

Adpositions, Phrasal affixes, Bound morphemes.The distinction between adpositions and case affixes: In African languages case

morpheme often has the status of phrasal affixes governed by degree of phonological interaction with the neighboring words. But this is not quite clear distinction. For example in Bambara ‘postpositions’ and Kanuri case suffixes shows no significant difference in their morphological properties: both are bound morphemes with the distribution characteristics of phrasal affixes and both exhibit some degree of phonological interaction with the last word of the noun phrase with which they combine.

It has been observed that comitative prepositions or prefix occurs only in many African languages in which all the other case markers are postpositions or suffixes.

Case affixes and adpositions

Typologists often divide languages into types according to so called basic word order, often understood as the order of subject (S), object (O) and verb (V) in a typical declarative sentence. The vast majority of the languages of the world fall into one of three groups:

SOV (Japanese, Tamil, Turkish etc.) SVO (Fula, Chinese, English etc.) VSO (Arabic, Tongan, Welsh etc.)Logically speaking, there should be nothing wrong with the three other possibilities: VOS (Malagasy ‘Malayo-Polynesian language’), OVS (Western Nilotic Pari) and OSV.

African languages do not differ from languages in other parts of the world in their basic word order. But at the level of clauses constituent order the diversity of the African continent differ from what has been observed at the world level as follows:

The proportion of African languages with particularly rigid (not flexible) clause constituent order is relatively high.

The proportion of African languages with basic VSO order is roughly comparable to that observed at the world level, but the proportion of languages with SVO is not.

Word order typology

They are attested in clauses expressing identification, existence, location or attribution of qualities with ATM value identical to that expressed in verbal predication by the verb tenses commonly labeled ‘indicative present’.

Example involving juxtaposition of NPs or adposition phrases in Kanuri language

  bintu fero ‘Bintu is a girl’ Bintu girl musa kano-lan ‘Musa is in Kano’ Musa Kano-LOCThese sometimes are analyzed as predicative words as irregular verbs, but

labels such as ‘non-verbal predicative’ or ‘non-verbal copula’ in African languages descriptions. Such predicatives are particularly common in West African languages.

Non-verbal predication

Bambara language (Mande, Niger-Congo) illustrates the type of relativisation strategy in which the relative clause is not embedded in the main clause. In the following example the relative marker miŋ is present within the relative clause , the location of miŋ signaling the relativised position.

wulu ′miŋ ye demisεŋ ′kiŋ, n y′ o bolit Dכ ′ye dog REL PERF child bit I PERF this.one running

see ‘I saw the dog the bit the child running away’

Embedded relatives treated as noun modifiers that precede the noun they modify found in Amharic language but this is very exceptional case in African language.

The predominant relativisation strategy in which embedded relative are treated as noun modifiers that follow the noun they modify has been noted at the world level and particularly strong among African languages.

Complex constructions