Seminar for African Languages and Cultures

Presentation by Tonjes Veenstra

The next Seminar of African Languages and Linguistics of the Linguistics Service (RMCA) will take place on Friday February 11, 2011 at 2 pm in the CAPA building of the RMCA (meeting room on the ground flour).

Dr. Tonjes Veenstra  (Centre for General Linguistics, Berlin, Germany) will give a presentation on :

Grammatical Aspects of the Bantu Diaspora

Mauritian Creole (MC) is a French-related creole spoken on Mauritius. A major part of the slave population involved in the creation of this language were speakers of (several) Bantu languages. One of the leading questions in this talk is whether there is also linguistic evidence for this link. We discuss three cases. First, we discuss article incorporation. We show that incorporated articles in MC are modelled on noun class prefixes as found in Bantu (Baker 1984). Second, we discuss Vowel Harmony (Hyman 1999). It is shown that this process regulates the distribution of incorporated articles, i.e. which nouns receive an incorporated article, as well as which article is incorporated (Strandquist 2005). Third, we report on the CJ/DJ form. In MC and in some southern and eastern Bantu languages we find two alternating verb forms expressing the same TMA semantics but differing in the relation it has with what follows We argue that MC exhibits a pattern similar to zone S languages rather than zone P languages, although the available socio-historic evidence points towards zone P languages as the main substrate for MC. The implications of this discrepancy will be discussed in full detail.

More info: Muriel Garsou