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A Grammar of Makwe presents a detailed description of a hitherto largely undocumented Bantu language spoken in the North of Mozambique. Historically speaking, Makwe is the outcome of a long-standing contact between Makonde as spoken in the interior of Tanzania and Mozambique and Swahili as spoken along the East African coast. This grammar treats Makwe phonology, the morphology of nouns, verbs and minor word categories, the semantics of verbal conjugations, and different syntactic topics. A rich collection of texts is offered at the end. Throughout the work, the linguistic analyses are abundantly illustrated with natural speech examples. Of special interest are the so-called conjoint and disjoint verb forms and modifiers which present a striking example of an interface between phonology, morphology, syntax and pragmatics. Maud Devos received for this study her doctoral degree at Leiden University in 2004. She subsequently worked on Shangaji, another Bantu language from Mozambique, with a postdoctoral grant from the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Documentation Project. She is currently a researcher at the Linguistics Department of the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren (Belgium), where she is involved in a project on grammaticalization and (inter)subjectification.
This book is dedicated to the reconstruction of the early history of pottery in the Bantu area.
This important contribution to the sustainable development of Rwanda is the result of a collaboration between the RMCA's service of Linguistics and the IRST of Butare. It is supported by the Belgian Federal Science Policy, the Belgian Development Cooperation and the French speaking community of Belgium.
In this period in which Africa is struggling for rehabilitation and revival on so many fronts, research on the history, cultures, and languages of this continent is all the more crucial. Linguists are making industrious attempts to reconstruct macrophyla, such as Nostratic, while the internal unity of purely African phyla, such as Niger-Congo, is still judged tentative, a fact which confirms the need for African comparative linguistics. Studies in African Comparative Linguistics offers 21 articles dealing with diverse topics in this domain of research. It comprises a representative selection of present-day Niger-Congo research, with a special focus on Bantu and Mande.
Cette étude décrit le ngangela (langue bantu classée K12b par Guthrie) de Menongue à travers l'analyse de sa tonologie. Il s'agit d'un système tonal restreint. Deux règles contextuelles font du ngangela une langue à cas tonals. La segmentation phrastique en thème-rhème permet de définir les conditions de leur application. L'usage de la phonologie lexicale mène à une structuration en domaines à l'intérieur desquels s'observent des restrictions d'expression tonale qui s'appliquent indépendamment de toute concaténation. Si les nominaux ont en partie conservé des distinctions tonales, la neutralisation est plus forte avec les racines verbales. Au niveau post-lexical, d'autres règles interviennent, du pont au sein des groupes prosodiques aux applications tonales sur les thèmes verbaux. La réalisation prosodique d'un énoncé s'explique aussi à l'aide de la théorie de l'optimalité, sur la base d'une trentaine de contraintes hiérarchisées. L'ensemble des données recueillies et des faits relatés contribue à une meilleure connaissance de ce type de tonologie, proche de système accentuel. Le fait que cela porte sur une langue et une région peu connues ouvre de nouvelles perspectives sur l'ensemble de la zone K des langues bantu. Quelques premières comparaisons sont proposées, notamment avec les autres variétés ngangela. |
