LINGUIST List 14.3417

Wed Dec 10 2003

Books: Language Description: Bodomo

Editor for this issue: Madhavi Jammalamadaka <madhulinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. lincom.europa, Dagaare: Bodomo

Title: Dagaare
Series Title: Languages of the World/ Materials 261
			
Publication Year: 2003	
Publisher: Lincom GmbH www.lincom-europa.com
 http://lincom.at		 
			
Author: A.B. Bodomo, The University of Hong Kong 

Paperback: ISBN: 3895865958, Pages: 60, Price: EUR 29.20
			
Abstract:

Dagaare is a Mabia language of the Gur branch of the Niger-Congo
language family of Africa. It is spoken mainly in northwestern Ghana
by about 1.5 million people. This grammatical sketch, based on the
Central Dialect spoken around Jirapa, is divided into three chapters
of phonology, morphology and syntax. Chapter one provides the basic
phonological features of the language, including vowel harmony and
tone. Chapter two deals with the basic morphology of nouns and
verbs. Chapter three sketches some syntactic structures of the nominal
and verbal phrases. These chapters are preceded by a summary of
pertinent sociolinguistic facts about the language. A text with
interlinear translations and a short Dagaare - English vocabulary list
conclude this grammatical sketch. Basic bibliography: Bodomo,
A. B. 1997. The Structure of Dagaare. Stanford Monographs in African
Languages, CSLI publications. Kennedy, Jack. 1966. The Phonology of
Dagaari. Institute of African Studies, Legon, Accra!
 
Lingala
MICHAEL MEEUWIS 
University of Antwerp

Lingala is a Bantu language spoken in the western and northern
sections of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (including its
capital Kinshasa), in northern Angola, and in the eastern part of the
Peoples Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville). In all these areas
of expansion it has mother-tongue speakers but is at the same time
used by others as a lingua franca. In terms of its history, Lingala is
particularly known for its recent appearance (late nineteenth century)
and the pidgin-like context of its emergence. Structurally, Lingala
shares with neighboring and genetically related languages a
meaning-distinctive role of tone, a vowel system consisting of seven
phonemes, and a use of derivational morphemes to expand the syntactic
and semantic range of verb stems. However, Lingala is often viewed as
an anomaly in the Bantu family because of the remarkably low
complexity of its nominal morphology (i.e., a limited class concord
system). Its verbal morphology, and in particular its temporal and
aspectual inflection, is nonetheless notoriously complex. TAM
distinctions are conveyed through the use of infixes, tone, and
auxiliarization. At the level of syntax, Lingala is marked, among
other things, by a specific way of forming cleft-sentences. The
present volume presents an overview of the phonological, tonological,
and morphological characteristics of this language, and also includes
a section on the main syntactic patterns, as well as a sample text
with morphemic glosses and a translation.

Lingfield(s): Language Description

Subject Language(s): Lingala (Language Code: LIN)

Written In: English (Language Code: ENG)

 See this book announcement on our website: 
 http://linguistlist.org/get-book.html?BookID=8310.