When Linguists and Speakers Do Not Agree: The Endangered Grammar of Verbal Art in West Africa

Abstract

Across Africa, linguistic techniques that are closely associated with traditional genres are vulnerable to changes in traditional habits, and often become extinct long before the language is recognized as endangered. Their loss accounts for the discrepancy between professional linguist's assessment and the speakers’ perception of the vitality of the language. The study discusses an array of endangered storytelling strategies accumulated by Wan (Mande; Côte d'Ivoire) in response to the needs of traditional narrative performance. Such strategies include morphosyntactic means that allow the storyteller to manage a complex narrative without resorting to explicit lexical encoding or multiplying the number of sentences.

Reported speech in Kakabe: Loose syntax with flexible indexicality

“…This distribution suggests that the choice of pronominal strategy is sensitive to the need to avoid potential confusion between the current speaker/listener and the story's characters. The same need has been argued by Nikitina (2012aNikitina ( , 2018 to affect, in some logophoric languages, the choice between logophoric and first person pronouns. The indirect pronominal strategy of Kakabe is in this sense parallel to the logophoric strategy of some other languages in allowing the storytellers to distinguish, in reported speech, their own persona from that of their characters.…”

A typological portrait of Mano, Southern Mande

“…Idiatov (2010) reported on other Mande languages with quotative indexes, in particular, Jula of Samatiguila or the Ko dialect of Mende (Western Mande) and observed that they are used non-predicatively as clauselinking markers. A polysemy such as the one attested in Mano (quotative, intentionality) has also been attested in Wan, Southern Mande (Nikitina 2018a), while Mandinka adds prospective to the range of meaning that is expressed by the quotative construction (Creissels and Sambou 2013: 443-445). The same type of polysemy is also widely attested outside the Mande family.…”

Reported speech forms a dedicated syntactic domain

“…It is also quite common to find in R pronouns that do not occur outside constructions with reported speech. An example of this is the use of specialised logophoric markers in African languages (Clements 1975;Hagège 1974;Nikitina 2012b, Nikitina 2018, and also beyond the African continent (Bugaeva 2008;Daniel 2015;Demirok & Öztürk 2015;Nau 2006). In (20), a special logophoric pronoun is used to refer to the reported speaker; in (21), special logophoric pronouns are used to refer both to the reported speaker and to the reported listener.…”