In A Grammar of Lopit, Jonathan Moodie and Rosey Billington provide the first detailed description of Lopit, an Eastern Nilotic language traditionally spoken in the Lopit Mountains in South Sudan. Drawing on extensive primary data, the authors describe the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the Lopit language. Their analyses offer new insights into phenomena characteristic of Nilo-Saharan languages, such as ‘Advanced Tongue Root’ vowel distinctions, tripartitite number marking, and marked-nominative case systems, and they uncover patterns which are previously unattested within the Eastern Nilotic family, such as a three-way contrast in aspect, number marking with the ‘greater singular’, and two kinds of inclusory constructions. This book offers a significant contribution to the descriptive and typological literature on African languages.

This monograph introduces students and scholars in linguistics, anthropology, and intercultural communication to anthropological linguistics, with a special focus on Africa. Among the topics addressed are semantic fields such as kinship or colour terminology, spatial orientation, linguistic relativity and the link between language and cognition, onomastics, the ethnography of communication, interactional sociolinguistics, emotions, (im)politeness strategies, conversation analysis, and non-verbal communication.

The strong development in research on grammatical number in recent years has created a need for a unified perspective. The different frameworks, the ramifications of the theoretical questions, and the diversity of phenomena across typological systems, make this a significant challenge. This book addresses the challenge with a series of in-depth analyses of number across a typologically diverse sample, unified by a common set of descriptive and analytic questions from a semantic, morphological, syntactic, and discourse perspective. Each case study is devoted to a single language, or in a few cases to a language group. They are written by specialists who can rely on first-hand data or on material of difficult access, and can place the phenomena in the context of the respective system. The studies are preceded and concluded by critical overviews which frame the discussion and identify the main results and open questions. With specialist chapters breaking new ground, this book will help number specialists relate their results to other theoretical and empirical domains, and it will provide a reliable guide to all linguists and other researchers interested in number.

This book presents a state-of-the-art cross-linguistic survey of applicative constructions in the functional-typological tradition. An introductory section sets the terminological and analytical stage, presents the methodology used by the different chapters, and provides a typological outlook. The individual contributions address the morphological, syntactic and semantic variation of applicatives, as well as their discourse-pragmatic function. They cover all major language families and some isolates that feature some illuminating version of the phenomenon, paying special attention to language-internal variation and unity. The phenomena surveyed range from those instances usually considered canonical (valency-increasing, syntactically and semantically predictable, productive, dedicated, and optional) to those occasionally understudied in descriptive works and frequently neglected in comparative studies (valency-neutral, rather unpredictable, lexicalized, syncretic, and/or obligatory).

This volume contains a selection of papers that were presented at the 53rd Annual Conference on African Linguistics, which was held virtually at the University of California San Diego. There are 21 papers covering phonology, morphology, syntax, lexical semantics, sociolinguistics, typology and historical linguistics. The volume features a keynote paper that proposes a novel community-based approach to language documentation. African languages investigated in detail include Wolof, Mende, Dangme, Kusaal, Nzema, Anii, Nigerian Pidgin, Tunen, Nyokon, Vale, Lokoya, Lopit, Otuho, Kalenjin, Tiriki, Oromo, Tigrinya, Asá, Qwadza, and Ikalanga.

Diversity in African Languages contains a selection of revised papers from the 46th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, held at the University of Oregon. Most chapters focus on single languages, addressing diverse aspects of their phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, information structure, or historical development. These chapters represent nine different genera: Mande, Gur, Kwa, Edoid, Bantu, Nilotic, Gumuzic, Cushitic, and Omotic. Other chapters investigate a mix of languages and families, moving from typological issues to sociolinguistic and inter-ethnic factors that affect language and accent switching. Some chapters are primarily descriptive, while others push forward the theoretical understanding of tone, semantic problems, discourse related structures, and other linguistic systems. The papers on Bantu languages reflect something of the internal richness and continued fascination of the family for linguists, as well as maturation of research on the family. The distribution of other papers highlights the need for intensified research into all the language families of Africa, including basic documentation, in order to comprehend linguistic diversities and convergences across the continent. In this regard, the chapter on Daats’íin (Gumuzic) stands out as the first-ever published article on this hitherto unknown and endangered language found in the Ethiopian-Sudanese border lands.

The first attempt at a restrictive theory of the linear order of sentences and phrases of the world's languages, by one of the founders of cartographic syntax. Linearization, or the typical sequence of words in a sentence, varies tremendously from language to language. Why, for example, does the English phrase “a white table” need a different word order from the French phrase “une table blanche,” even though both refer to the same object? Guglielmo Cinque challenges the current understanding of word order variation, which assumes that word order can be dealt with simply by putting a head either before or after its complements and modifiers. The subtle variations in word order, he says, can provide a window into understanding the deeper structure of language and are in need of a sophisticated explanation. The bewildering variation in word order among the languages of the world, says Cinque, should not dissuade us from researching what, if anything, determines which orders are possible (and attested/attestable) and which orders are impossible (and not attested/nonattestable), both when they maximally conform to the “head-final” or “head-initial” types and when they depart from them to varying degrees. His aim is to develop a restrictive theory of word order variation—not just a way to derive the ideal head-initial and head-final word orders but also the mixed cases. In the absence of an explicit theory of linearization, Cinque provides a general approach to derive linear order from a hierarchical arrangement of constituents, specifically, by assuming a restrictive movement analysis that creates structures that can then be linearized by Richard S. Kayne's Linear Correspondence Axiom.

In this volume, international experts in negation provide a comprehensive overview of cross-linguistic and philosophical research in the field, as well as accounts of more recent results from experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to a range of fundamental questions ranging from why negation displays so many distinct linguistic forms to how prosody and gesture participate in the interpretation of negative utterances. Following an introduction from the editors, the chapters are arranged in eight parts that explore, respectively, the fundamentals of negation; issues in syntax; the syntax-semantics interface; semantics and pragmatics; negative dependencies; synchronic and diachronic variation; the emergence and acquisition of negation; and experimental investigations of negation. The volume will be an essential reference for students and researchers across a wide range of disciplines, and will facilitate further interdisciplinary work in the field.

This volume contains 14 descriptive chapters and a collection of 4 transcribed texts in Mursi, a highly endangered language spoken in the Lower Omo Valley in Ethiopia.