A Grammar of Seenku / / Laura McPherson.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DG Plus DeG Package 2020 Part 1
• VerfasserIn: McPherson, Laura,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter Mouton, , [2020]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Language: English
• Series: Mouton Grammar Library [MGL] , 83
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (XX, 572 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

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