ILCAA Joint Research Project

Diachronic Perspectives on Language Description and Typology in Bantu (jrp000292)

Keywords

• Bantu
• Typology
• Language description
• Language change
• Grammaticalization

Areas

• Sub-Saharan Africa

Website

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About the Project

Project term: April, 2024–March, 2027

There is a long tradition of describing Bantu languages and a more recent trend towards the elaboration of a family-internal typology within Bantu, which is typically believed to be fairly homogeneous. Against this background, this project aims to provide new diachronic perspectives for organising descriptive and cross-linguistic observations of Bantu languages. By refining theoretical considerations of language change, we will provide unified explanations for the descriptive findings from the languages that the project members have worked on so far, as well as for variation between Bantu languages. The project also has the potential to contribute to the study of historical linguistics by presenting new insights into language change that Bantu languages have undergone.

Members

Coordinator

• Makoto FURUMOTO

ILCAA Staff

• Daisuke SHINAGAWA (Co-Coordinator)

Joint Researchers

• Maya ABE
• Yuko ABE
• Shigeki KAJI
• Junko KOMORI
• Keiko TAKEMURA
• Kumiko MIYAZAKI
• Nobuko YONEDA
• Hannah GIBSON
• Hilde GUNNINK
• Koen BOSTOEN
• Lutz MARTEN
• Malin PETZELL
• Maud DEVOS
• Rasmus BERNANDER
• Rozenn GUÉROIS
• Sara PACCHIAROTTI
• Seunghun LEE

Outputs

Meetings

The 2nd meeting ：Report (Japanese)

• Date/Time: Thu 15 Aug 2024 9:00–12:00
• Venue: University of Dar es Salaam
• Language: Japanese

• 1. Makoto Furumoto (ILCAA)

  Introduction

  2. Lutz Marten (SOAS), Hannah Gibson (Essex), and Rozenn Guérois (CNRS-LLACAN)

  'Approaching morphosyntactic variation through (surface) parameters'

  3. Daisuke Shinagawa (ILCAA), Nobuko Yoneda (Osaka), and Yuko Abe (Lanzhou)

  'Five years from the ILCAA Bantu-MV project: a critical review and a future perspective'

  4. Rasmus Bernander (Gothenburg)

  'Grammatical reconstruction as a tool for field work and language description of Bantu languages'

  5. All participants

  Discussion

The 1st meeting ：Report (Japanese)

• Date/Time: Sat 25 May 2024 14:00–17:00
• Venue: 304, Online meeting
• Language: Japanese

• 1. Makoto FURUMOTO (ILCAA, Juniour Fellow)

  “Introduction to the project background and prospects”

  2. Shigeki KAJI (ILCAA, Fellow)

  “Some features of Congo Swahili in reference to the micro-variation way of survey”

  3. All participants

  Discussion

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