A Grammar of Mina

Frajzyngier, Zygmunt; Johnston, Eric; Edwards, Adrian

doi:10.1515/9783110893908

Cited by 53 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…On the other hand, the Third Person Non-human Pronoun, nɘ̄ , encodes neither gender nor number distinctions (Frajzyngier & Johnston 2005). A similar type of system is found in Pero even though, from the description provided by Frajzyngier (1989), it is not entirely clear what type of assignment rules the language has and whether gender assignment is rigid or manipulable. The remaining four Chadic languages in the sample have higher GCSs (between 0.62 -Lele -and 0.45-Gidar).…”

Section: Genealogical and Areal Biases In The Distribution Of Gcssmentioning

confidence: 89%

Exploring Grammatical Complexity Crosslinguistically

Garbo¹

2016

Linguistic Discovery

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This paper proposes a set of principles and methodologies for the crosslinguistic investigation of grammatical complexity and applies them to the in-depth study of one grammatical domain, gender. The complexity of gender is modeled on the basis of crosslinguistically documented properties of gender systems and by taking into consideration interactions between gender and two other grammatical domains: nominal number and evaluative morphology. The study proposes a complexity metric for gender that consists of six features: "Gender values", "Assignment rules", "Number of indexation (agreement) domains", "Cumulative exponence of gender and number", "Manipulation of gender assignment triggered by number/countability", and "Manipulation of gender assignment triggered by size". The metric is tested on a sample of 84 African languages, organized in subsamples of genealogically related languages. The results of the investigation show that: (1) the gender systems of the sampled languages lean towards high complexity scores; (2) languages with purely semantic gender assignment tend to lack pervasive gender indexation; (3) languages with a high number of gender distinctions tend to exhibit pervasive gender indexation; (4) some of the uses of manipulable gender assignment are only attested in languages with a high number of gender distinctions and/or pervasive indexation. With respect to the distribution of the gender complexity scores, the results show that genealogically related languages tend to have the same or similar gender complexity scores. Languages that display exceedingly low or high gender complexity scores when compared with closely related languages exhibit distinctive sociolinguistic profiles (contact, bi-or multilingualism). The implications of these findings for the typology of gender systems and the crosslinguistic study of grammatical complexity and its distribution are discussed.

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Section: Genealogical and Areal Biases In The Distribution Of Gcssmentioning

confidence: 89%

Exploring Grammatical Complexity Crosslinguistically

Garbo¹

2016

Linguistic Discovery

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“…The grouping of nouns denoting animals, body parts, body sensations etc. by *CVreduplication in Proto-Masa is quite reminiscent of the Afroasiatic prefix *m(V)- (Meyer & Wolff, 2019), whose reflexes in Chadic ma-/mu-/m@-are known to occur with such a classifying use (Barreteau, 1978;Frajzyngier et al, 2011;Schuh, 2008 etc.). In Mofo-Gudur for example, mà-occurs as a derivational morpheme in a considerable proportion of nouns including agentives, toponyms, and nouns denoting plants, animals, body parts and conditions, etc.…”

Section: *Cv-reduplication Is Phonological Duplicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Frozen reduplication in Gizey: insights into analogical reduplication, phonological and morphological doubling in Masa

Guitang

2021

Morphology

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This paper discusses analogy as a source of total reduplication in Gizey (Masa < Chadic < Afroasiatic). Building on the Dual Theory of reduplication, I first argue that CV-reduplication in the Masa branch of Chadic is a phonological duplication substituting for the segmental material of a now obsolete prefix (*mV-). I then show that a considerable number of total reduplicatives in Gizey derive from analogical reduplication (morphological doubling) entailing the shift from Proto-Masa *CV-reduplication to total reduplication (*CV-reduplication > TOTAL reduplication). The target sublexicon triggering this analogical shift consists of pre-existing ideophonic/onomatopoeic total reduplicatives. The lexical material examined in this paper is composed mainly of frozen reduplicatives i.e., word forms built by duplicating unattested bases. I show that these vestigial reduplicatives also allow for positing two other morphological doubling processes where specific cophonologies truncate specified phonological material. I also consider potential challenges dealing with infixal reduplication.

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“…Scholars of African languages have noticed the presence of two aspectual and tense systems (Gouffé, 1966(Gouffé, , 1967(Gouffé, , 1968Hyman and Watters, 1984;Caron, 1986 andRobert, 1991;Pawlak, 1993;Jungraithmayr, 1994 and references there;Newman, 2000 and numerous other grammars of Chadic languages e.g. Frajzyngier with Shay, 2002;Frajzyngier and Johnston, with Edwards, 2005;Frajzyngier, 2008). In some Chadic languages, tense and aspectual systems mark the distinction between pragmatically dependent and pragmatically independent clauses.…”

Section: Focusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information Structure and Reference Systems: Toward a Non-Aprioristic Typology

Frajzyngier

2018

Journal of Language Contact

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The present article proposes a non-aprioristic approach to analyzing the domains of information structure and reference systems. The article is inspired by the papers in Information structuring of spoken language from a cross-linguistic perspective (Fernandez-Vest and Van Valin (eds.), 2016), and from my own research on languages for which only spoken data exist. As an outcome of this study it may turn out that 'information structure' and 'reference system' each constitute a distinct functional domain in some languages.

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A Grammar of Mina

Cited by 53 publications

References 0 publications

Exploring Grammatical Complexity Crosslinguistically

Exploring Grammatical Complexity Crosslinguistically

Frozen reduplication in Gizey: insights into analogical reduplication, phonological and morphological doubling in Masa

Information Structure and Reference Systems: Toward a Non-Aprioristic Typology

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