Forthcoming: Directional extensions in Chadic languages

Joseph Lovestrand

Synopsis

This monograph provides the first large-scale comparative study of how verbal morphology encodes directionality across Chadic languages. Drawing on a database of 91 languages spoken in Nigeria, Cameroon, and Chad, the book analyzes ventive, itive, vertical, and boundary-crossing extensions. The quantitative study examines where directional extensions occur and what meanings they can co-express, highlighting issues of multifunctionality and efficiency in grammar, as well as providing initial insights into their grammaticalization. The study advances the descriptive foundation of the least-documented Afroasiatic family language, while also contributing to theoretical discussions of motion events, verbal morphology, and morphosyntactic typology.

Author Biography

Joseph Lovestrand

Joseph Lovestrand is a Lecturer in Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex. His research spans descriptive, comparative, and formal linguistics, with a particular focus on lesser-studied languages including fieldwork in Chad, Cameroon and Indonesia. He earned his DPhil from the University of Oxford for work on Barayin (an East Chadic language) and was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at SOAS University of London.

Book cover

Published

September 23, 2025
LaTeX source on GitHub

Print ISSN

2511-7726
Cite as
Lovestrand, Joseph. Forthcoming. Directional extensions in Chadic languages. (Contemporary African Linguistics). Berlin: Language Science Press.

License

Creative Commons License

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