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December 7, 2012
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This article deals with the interaction between two subsystems of the grammar of Dinka, a Western Nilotic language: (i) the semantic role of a place adverbial as location, source or goal, and (ii) deictic directionality expressed in the verb. Some place adverbials do not encode the distinction between the three spatial roles, but some nouns and some complex noun phrases distinguish between an allative case, which encodes a goal, and an essive/ablative case, which encodes either a location or a source. The derivational morphology of verbs includes a distinction between direction towards the deictic centre (centripetal) and direction not towards the deictic centre (centrifugal). There are constraints on the combinability between a place adverbial with a given semantic role and a verb with a given derivational status. Thus, a goal adverbial requires either a centrifugal verb or a centripetal verb. In clauses with a single place adverbial, moreover, a source adverbial requires either a non-directional verb or a centripetal verb, and a location adverbial requires a non-directional verb.
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This paper seeks to establish the first cladistic subgrouping of Songhay explicitly based on shared arbitrary innovations, a prerequisite both for distinguishing recent loans from valid extra-Songhay comparanda and for determining how Songhay spread. The results indicate that the Northern Songhay languages of the Sahara form a valid subfamily, even though no known historical records link Tabelbala to the others, and that Northern Songhay and Western Songhay (spoken around Timbuktu and Djenné) together form a valid subfamily, Northwestern Songhay. The speakers of Proto-Northern Songhay practised cultivation and permanent architecture, but were unfamiliar with date palms. Proto-Northwestern Songhay was already in contact with Berber and probably (perhaps indirectly) with Arabic, and was spoken along the Niger River. Proto-Songhay itself appears likely to have been in contact with Gur languages, confirming its relatively southerly location. This result is compatible with two scenarios for the northerly spread of Songhay. On Hypothesis A, Northern Songhay spread out from an oasis north-east of Gao, probably Tadmakkat or Takedda, and Northwestern Songhay had been spoken in areas west of Gao which now speak Eastern Songhay. On Hypothesis B, Northern Songhay spread out from the Timbuktu region, and Western Songhay derives from heavy “de-creolising” influence by Eastern Songhay on an originally Northern Songhay language. To choose between these hypotheses, further fieldwork will be required.
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The paper discusses three categorial hybrids in the East Cushitic language Kambaata, viz. negative participles, agent adjectives and verbal nouns, all of which are shown to combine properties of two word classes (lexical categories) systematically. Unlike their affirmative counterparts, Kambaata negative relative verbs qualify as verbal adjectives (participles), because, apart from having verbal inflectional morphology and a completely verbal argument structure, they have also acquired adjectival morphology to indicate case/gender agreement with their head nouns. The combination of verbal and adjectival features is less balanced for agent adjectives, which retain fewer properties of the verbs they are based on; however, they are still able to govern objects and be modified by adverbial clauses. Kambaata verbal nouns behave almost entirely like verbs in relation to their dependents but as nouns with respect to the clause where they feature as arguments. I argue that the negative participle formation and the verbal noun formation are inflectional processes which change the word form word class from verb to adjective and verb to noun, respectively, but which preserve the properties of the lexeme word class (Verb). In contrast, the agent adjective formation is analysed as a derivational process with a greater impact on the lexeme word class.
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