A Grammar of Seenku / / Laura McPherson.
Seenku is a Western Mande language of the Samogo group spoken in southwestern Burkina Faso by approximately 17,000 speakers. It has undergone a lot of phonological reduction, leading to a rich segmental and tonal phoneme inventory but mainly mono- and sesquisyllabic roots. The language has four cont...
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Superior document: | Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DG Plus DeG Package 2020 Part 1 |
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Place / Publishing House: | Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter Mouton, , [2020] ©2020 |
Year of Publication: | 2020 |
Language: | English |
Series: | Mouton Grammar Library [MGL] ,
83 |
Online Access: | |
Physical Description: | 1 online resource (XX, 572 p.) |
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Other title: | Frontmatter -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Sketch of the grammar -- 3 Segmental phonology -- 4 Tone -- 5 Nominal morphology -- 6 Pronouns and anaphora -- 7 Compound nouns -- 8 Noun phrase structure -- 9 Ideophones and onomatopoeia -- 10 Postpositions and adverbials -- 11 Coordination -- 12 Verb stems and verbal derivation -- 13 Verbal inflection -- 14 Non-verbal predicates -- 15 Comparatives -- 16 Interrogation -- 17 Relative clauses -- 18 Conditional constructions -- 19 Complement and purposive clauses -- 20 Clause coordination and event sequencing -- 21 Information structure and discourse -- 22 Artistic adaptation of language -- 23 Texts -- Bibliography -- Index |
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Summary: | Seenku is a Western Mande language of the Samogo group spoken in southwestern Burkina Faso by approximately 17,000 speakers. It has undergone a lot of phonological reduction, leading to a rich segmental and tonal phoneme inventory but mainly mono- and sesquisyllabic roots. The language has four contrastive levels of tone that combine to create over a dozen contours. Tone has a high functional load lexically and grammatically, permeating all aspects of grammar. Most verbs have two stem forms: a realis form and an irrealis form. The realis is derived from the irrealis by infixing a high vowel before the stem vowel, creating a diphthong. The use of a particular stem form is determined by aspect and construction type, but most other morphosyntactic meanings (e.g. progressive aspect or causative) are expressed analytically. Like most Mande languages, Seenku has an S Aux O V X word order in addition to areal clause-final negation. It displays a reduced set of post-subject “predicate markers” compared to other Mande languages, and those that are attested are variably realized only by tone changes and lengthening on the subject itself. |
Format: | Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web. |
ISBN: | 9783110765021 9783110696271 |
ISSN: | 0933-7636 ; |
DOI: | 10.1515/9783110765021 |
Access: | restricted access |
Hierarchical level: | Monograph |
Statement of Responsibility: | Laura McPherson. |