Forthcoming: Pamoja tena 'Together again': African linguistics after COVID

Vicki Carstens (ed), Katherine R. Russell (ed), Olawale Akingbade (ed), Deborah Morton (ed), Michael Diercks (ed)

Synopsis

The papers in this volume were selected from those presented at the 54th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, which was held at the University of Connecticut in June, 2024. The volume contains 22 papers with diverse topics within phonology, morphology, syntax, language acquisition, and historical linguistics. The African languages that are investigated in this volume include Kom, Igbo, Dagaare, Igala, Kalenjin, Rɨ̀kpá, Ekhwa Adara, Hausa, Nduga, Maa, Lugwere, Emai, Seenku, Kirundi, Chichewa, Tiriki, Kono, and Kasem.

Chapters

  • Labial-velar stop placement identification in Igbo
    Roslyn Burns, Jason Shaw
  • Vowel alternations in Dagaare number marking
    Cassandra Caragine
  • A negative alternation
    Negation head movement allomorphy in Igala
    Brandon Chaperon
  • Two types of verbal number in Kalenjin pluractionality
    Nadja Fiebig
  • Interactions between lexical tone and accent in Rɨ̀kpáʔ
    Kathryn Franich, Fridah Gam
  • Towards a typology of Bantu complementizers
    John Gluckmann
  • A reconstruction of proto-Sawabantu
    Rebecca Grollemund
  • Polar and WH-question formation in Ekhwa Adara
    Margaret Matte, Nhu Anh Nguyen, Emmanuel Bawa, Josh Amaris, Zhilang Liu, Aidan Malanoski, Olivia Mignone, Shane Quin, Alaa Sharif, Jason Kandybowicz
  • A critique of areal-only approaches to Bantu spirantization
    Brandon Kieffer
  • The interaction between tone and intonation in Hausa WH-questions
    Han Li
  • An overview of Nduga phonology
    Ken Olson
  • Middle verbs in Maa
    Alternating, media tantum, and (spurious) look-alikes
    Doris Payne
  • Non-prototypical usages of the Lugwere causative extension
    Lilja Sæbo
  • Beyond the transitive prototype
    Bodily-condition predications in Emai
    Ronald Schaefer
  • A collaborative methodology for grammatical tone acquisition in Seenku
    Laura McPherson
  • Phono-semantic conditioning in Kirundi loanword noun class allocation
    Patrick Kintchsular
  • A scattered deletion account of Chichewa partial dislocation
    Qiushi Chen
  • Interpretive properties of perception verbs in Tiriki
    Hyperraising and copy-raising
    Katherine Johnson, Michael Diercks
  • A speech corpus of Kom verbal arts and its applications
    Matthew Faytak, Ivo Forghema Njuasi, Nichola Mori, Angelique Griffith
  • Headless relative clauses and anti-agreement in Kirundi
    Willie Myers
  • Deriving SOV word order in Kono
    Jason Smith
  • Focus and the association with focus sensitive particle "yerane" in Kasem
    Daniel Aremu

Biographies

Vicki Carstens

Vicki Carstens is a professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut. Much of her work is concerned with agreement phenomena and nominal syntax in Bantu, with recent projects focused primarily on the Nguni languages of South Africa. Her work has appeared in venues such as Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Syntax, Language, and The Linguistic Review.

Katherine R. Russell

Katherine R. Russell is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research involves looking at suprasegmental phonological phenomena, like tone, nasalization, and harmony, from the perspective of their interfaces with morphology. She draws primarily on data collected through fieldwork in West Africa on languages within the Kwa, Kru and Gur families.

Olawale Akingbade

Olawale Akingbade is a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research interests broadly include the documentation of understudied and endangered languages in West Africa, with a specific focus on the phonology-morphology-syntax interface. His previous work includes studies on splitting verbs, tono-grammar, and acoustic analysis. His current research examines the nominal structure of North-Western Edoid languages.

Deborah Morton

Deborah Morton (PhD, The Ohio State University) is Associate Teaching Professor of Linguistics and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania, United States. Her research interests are in the suprasegmental phonology and semantics of West African languages, in particular the documentation and analysis of the Anii language. Her current work focuses on the interaction of tense, aspect and modality, and investigating the contributions African languages can make to our understanding of modal semantics.

Michael Diercks

Michael Diercks is a Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Pomona College in California, US. His work focuses on the morphology and syntax of East African languages, mainly addressing Bantu languages. He has worked on constructions such as locative inversion, object marking, and hyper-raising, among others. Theoretically, his work has addressed locality, Agree, DP-licensing, and the intersection of information structure with syntax.

book cover

Published

January 24, 2025
LaTeX source on GitHub

Series

Contemporary African Linguistics

Print ISSN

2511-7726
Cite as
Carstens, Vicki, Russell, Katherine R., Akingbade, Olawale, Morton, Deborah & Diercks, Michael (eds.). Forthcoming. Pamoja tena 'Together again': African linguistics after COVID. (Contemporary African Linguistics). Berlin: Language Science Press.
Copyright (c) 2025 Vicki Carstens; Roslyn Burns, Daniel Aremu, Jason Shaw, Cassandra Caragine, Sophie Migacz, Michael Obiri Yeboah, Jack Pruett, Brandon Chaperon, Qiushi Chen, Matthew Faytak, Ivo Forghema Njuasi, Nichola Mori, Angelique Griffith, Nadja Fiebig, Kathryn Franich, Fridah Gam, John Gluckmann, Rebecca Grollemund, Katherine Johnson, Michael Diercks, Brandon Kieffer, Patrick Kintchsular, Han Li, Margaret Matte, Nhu Anh Nguyen, Emmanuel Bawa, Josh Amaris, Zhilang Liu, Aidan Malanoski, Olivia Mignone, Shane Quin, Alaa Sharif, Jason Kandybowicz, Laura McPherson, Willie Myers, Ken Olson, Doris Payne, Lilja Sæbo, Ronald Schaefer, Jason Smith

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.