Studies on Event Integration Patterns in African Languages (jrp000186)
Keywords
Africa
linguistics
semantic typology
event integration
motion in space
state change
aspect
multi-verb constructions
Areas
Africa
Website
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About the Project
Project term: April, 2012–March, 2015
Covering spoken languages in all the major language phyla in Africa (Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, Afroasiatic, and Khoisan), and including sign languages in Africa in its scope of study, this project investigates how African languages characteristically integrate different types of components of macro-events (complex events) in such semantic domains as motion, state change, and aspect to express them morphosyntactically (Talmy 1985, 1991, 2000), and addresses theoretical issues raised by previous studies (e.g., what macro-events are, whether another typological type like the equipollent type exists) and those that we may encounter as our studies advance. Many African languages have been reported to commonly use multi-verb constructions to integrate event components, but no systematic comparison between morphosyntactic or semantic structures of these constructions seems to have been made so far. By comparing not only languages within Africa with each other but also languages in
Africa with those in other areas of the world, the project examines how the African languages under study are classified into the typological types and whether there is any property that is characteristically found across African languages. The project further looks at how consistently characteristic patterns of expressing events are found across different semantic domains within each individual language, language family, and phylum.
Kazuhiro KAWACHI, Project Coordinator (Associate Professor, National Defence Academy of Japan)
Members
Coordinator
Kazuhiro KAWACHI (Associate Professor, National Defence Academy of Japan)
“Modality markers grammaticalized from motion verbs in Chaga: With special reference to inter-dialectally discrepant construals on modal ‘definiteness’”