Gerrit Jan Dimmendaal

The Consonants of Proto-upper Cross and Their Implications for the Classification of the Upper Cross Languages

The Turkana Language

This advanced historical linguistics course book deals with the historical and comparative study of African languages. The first part functions as an elementary introduction to the comparative method, involving the establishment of lexical and grammatical cognates, the reconstruction of their historical development, techniques for the subclassification of related languages, and the use of language-internal evidence, more specifically the application of internal reconstruction. Part II addresses language contact phenomena and the status of language in a wider, cultural-historical and ecological context. Part III deals with the relationship between comparative linguistics and other disciplines. In this rich course book, the author presents valuable views on a number of issues in the comparative study of African languages, more specifically concerning genetic diversity on the African continent, the status of pidginised and creolised languages, language mixing, and grammaticalisation.

Historical Linguistics and the Comparative Study of African Languages

Whereas Africa as a typological area is often associated with extensive verb morphology and verb serialization, this collection of studies shows that there is tremendous typological diversity at the clausal level. Verb serialization in the Khoisan area contrasts with extensive case-marking in languages of northeastern Africa, which also use converbs and light verb plus coverb constructions. Although the categorial distinction between nouns and verbs is generally clear in African languages, a number of them nevertheless provide intricate analytical challenges in this respect. Whereas some languages are strongly head marking at the clausal level, others manifest an interesting mixture of alternative strategies for the coding of participants. The analysis of information packaging, and related issues such as split ergativity, Differential Object Marking, and discourse-configurational properties also play a role in several contributions. The collection contains not only innovative analyses for the respective language families these languages belong to, but also material relevant for the current debate in theoretical linguistics concerning lexical specification as against construction-based approaches towards argument structure.

Gerrit Jan Dimmendaal

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