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Les manières d’ “être” et les mots pour le dire dans les langues d’Afrique Centrale (LINCOM Studies in African Linguistics, 31)
Lingua 114 (2004) 1429–1432
Book review Les manie`res d’ ‘‘eˆtre’’ et les mots pour le dire dans les langues d’Afrique Centrale (LINCOM Studies in African Linguistics, 31) Paulette Roulon-Doko, LINCOM Europa, Mu¨nchen/Newcastle, 1998, 160 p., ISBN 3-89586-520-6 This book is a collection of articles about how concepts of being are expressed in selected Adamawa-Ubangi languages from Central Africa. Adamawa-Ubangi is one of the subfamilies of Niger-Congo (cf. Boyd, 1989). All authors belong to the French Centre National de Recherche Scientifique and have long-standing experience with the languages they discuss. Diki-Kidiri is first-language speaker of Sango. The volume is structured as follows: Introduction (Marcel Diki-Kidiri and Paulette Roulon), Banda (France Cloarec-Heiss), Zande (Raymond Boyd), Yakoma (Pascal Boyeldieu), Sango (Marcel Diki-Kidiri), Gbaya (Paulette Roulon-Doko), Tupuri (Suzanne Ruelland). Concepts of being are expressed in these languages by several means: the juxtaposition of a subject and a non-verbal predicate, by a predicative marker or by a verb. The order of presentation of the languages goes from concepts of being marked by verbs only (Banda) to concepts of being never marked by a verb (Tupuri). Banda does have juxtapositional nonverbal predicates, but as Cloarec-Heiss (1986: 393–395) remarks, they are marginal. In their introduction, Roulon-Doko and Diki-Kidiri classify notions of being into the following functional domains (‘‘valeurs’’): existential, identifying, presentative, equational and situative, the latter covering notions linked to adpositional phrases, such as locative and comitative. They observe that none of these functional domains is associated with a particular structure in these languages and that it is not possible to reduce the different systems to a single organising scheme (p. 14–15). The presentation of the data is therefore guided by the structure of the individual languages. All articles start from the forms indicating notions of being and then deal with their semantic correlates. Grammaticalisation phenomena are regularly observed. As Diki-Kidiri and Roulon-Doko observe in their introduction, verbs of being in these languages are generally irregular (loss of lexical meaning, partial loss of verbal features). Diki-Kidiri classifies verbs of being in Sango on a scale from verb-like to less verb-like. Irregular verbs of being in Sango take tonal tense/aspect/mood marking like regular verbs. They are therefore still morphologically distinct from predicative markers (p. 97). Boyd (1989: 38, note 3) observes that a root du with meanings such as ‘stay’, ‘sit’, ‘be’ is well attested in Ubangi languages. Its behaviour in the individual languages differs: Yakoma shows a synchronic polysemy, stay, live, exist, be’, according to the syntactic 0024-3841/$ – see front matter # 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2003.08.001
1430
Book review
environment. All examples with, exist, be’ in Yakoma are incidentally conditional clauses (p. 75). In closely related Sango, du is in principle restricted to a non-real, wished state. The verb du means, be there’ in Zande. Apart from a verb of being with a general meaning, some of these languages (Yakoma, Sango, Gbaya) have verbs of being adding aspectual notions (‘stay’, ‘be still’, ‘be yet/be not yet’, ‘become’) or modal notions (Sango volitive ‘be’, Gbaya potential ‘be’). Sango uses the verbs ‘fall’ and ‘come’ with an attributive predicative for ‘become rapidly’ and ‘become’, respectively (pp. 108–109). The term ‘‘inchoative’’ would be more adequate for this use than the term perfective used by Diki-Kidiri. Predicative markers generally constitute a heterogeneous group because they are defined negatively with respect to verbs. I would like to point out the equational marker nga´ a` in Zande (pp. 50–57): it may function as a copula, as a determiner in noun phrases, as an introducer for adjuncts referring back to a subject or a topicalised noun phrase and as a complementiser for reported speech. This syntactic multifunctionality would be a nice testcase for alternative approaches to grammatical semantics: is it one morpheme with an invariant meaning, operating different syntactic environments (as Boyd does) or should it be seen as a morpheme or several morphemes whose uses have developed by grammaticalisation? Several languages have juxtaposition of subject and non-verbal predicate. As word order in noun phrases is often Head-Modifier, the order noun þ other noun/modifier may in theory lead to ambiguous constructions. Boyd (1989: 42) is the only author to discuss such problems. Sango and Yakoma prefer specific subjects in juxtapositional sentences, which delimits the subject from a nominal predicate. Some non-verbal predicates and complements of verbs of being show a special grammatical behaviour. Predicate adjectives in Banda (p. 23) and in Yakoma (p. 67) must be definite, while predicative adjectives in Zande show pronominal agreement with a pronominal antecedent (p. 59). A few languages admit verbal nouns as non-verbal predicates and this makes the delimitation of verbal and non-verbal predicates a delicate case. Yakoma uses it for a near future (p. 71) and for a passive-impersonal construction (pp. 73, 80). Tupuri has a similar type of passive-impersonal construction: a juxtapositional sentence where the predicate is ‘with’ þ verbal noun (pp. 141–142). A striking feature of the verbal noun in this construction is that it distinguishes completive and incompletive, marked by a tone pattern on the verbal noun. Tonal tense/aspect/mood marking is a regular feature of verbs in Tupuri (Ruelland, 1992) and the verbal noun in the passive-impersonal construction must have copied it from verbal sentences. The inflectional marking on the verbal noun suggests that the passive-impersonal construction should be analysed in a strictly synchronic approach as a stative verbal sentence, with a non-active subject and an aspect-marked nominalised verb. Constructions indicating being often show a particular behaviour with respect to negation. Zande and Tupuri have special negative forms for non-verbal sentences. Gbaya has a potential verb which is used in a negative sentence, in combination with a negative particle. Though some languages do not have negative counterparts of the existential (Banda) and the presentative (Tupuri) or, if so, only rarely (identifying sentences in Yakoma), other
Book review
1431
languages do have negative counterparts of these constructions: negative presentative in (Zande), negative existential (Yakoma, Sango). Verbs of being and predicative markers are essential in the structuring of sentences and discourse. There are several cases where a verb of being or a predicative marker is part of a grammaticalised construction. Given the attention that has been paid to grammaticalisation in African languages (Heine and Reh, 1984 and later publications by Heine and his collaborators), it would be interesting to see how verbs of being are used as a source for other grammatical markings in these Adamawa-Ubangi languages. 1. Tense/Aspect/Mood marker: Progressive marker in Banda (pp. 26–27); Obligative ‘He has to come’ in Sango (p. 102); Hypothetical and Consecutive in Gbaya (p. 114); Presentative between subject and verb in Gbaya (pp. 118–119); 2. Presentative: ‘be at’ to a presentative marker in Zande (pp. 45–47); 3. Relative marker: ‘be at’ to a relative marker in Zande (pp. 43–45); existential þ demonstrative in Banda to a relative/demonstrative (p. 27); 4. Focus marker: equational to focus marker in Banda (pp. 30–31) and Tupuri (pp. 151– 152); presentative to focus marker in Yakoma (pp. 80–82) and Zande (pp. 45–47); 5. Conditional marker: from cleft sentence to conditional marker in Banda (pp. 32–34); 6. Causal marker: Sango: identifier to causal conjunction in Yakoma (p. 83) Sango (p. 93); Gbaya: existential þ conjunction with fused subject pronoun introduces and links clauses of a narrative (p. 118); 7. Dubitative marker: Banda: when the identifying verb occurs between ‘say that’ and a complement clause, it indicates the non-commitment of the speaker towards the content of the complement clause (p. 34); Sentence-final identifier to emphatic interrogative in Sango (p. 93) and to dubitative marker in Banda (pp. 34–35). Some of the forms indicating being are borrowings. Cloarec-Heiss (1982) suggests on several occassions an influence of neighbouring, unrelated Central Sudanic languages on Banda. The verb ye`ke` in Sango is borrowed from Kikongo (Samarin, 1986), tu`ru`neˆ ‘change into’ in Yakoma is from French tourner (p. 78). The form nga´ a` ‘equative’ in Zande suggests that it has been borrowed from neighbouring Bantu languages. Meeussen (1967: 115) reconstructs comparative gga`(-) ‘like’ for Proto-Bantu, while Guthrie presents two relevant comparative Bantu forms: gga`- ‘become like’ (Comparative Series 753, Guthrie, 1971, vol. 2: 126; Guthrie, 1970, vol. 3: 201) and gga`- ‘as, like’ (Comparative Series 2263, Guthrie, 1970, vol. 4: 243). The predicative marker nı¯ in Zande is either a borrowing from Bantu or a genuine Ubangi form, that is cognate with the Proto-Bantu form. Relevant reconstructions are the Proto-Bantu affirmative predicative index nı´(-) (Meeussen, 1967: 115) and Proto-Gbaya ne´ ‘eˆ tre (essentiel) pre´ dicatif’ (Mon˜ ino, 1995: 665). In conclusion, this collection of articles is a valuable contribution to the description of African languages, to comparative Adamawa-Ubangi linguistics as well as to typology and grammaticalisation studies. All articles contain a wealth of examples, taken from texts, proverbs and everyday language. The form-to-meaning approach is a very useful model for the description of similar phenomena in other African languages. The concentration on a single language family illustrates well to what extent a grammatical domain may vary across a language family.
1432
Book review
References Boyd, R., 1989. Adamawa-Ubangi. In: Bendor-Samuel, J. (Ed.), The Niger-Congo Languages. University Press of America, Lanham, MD, pp. 178–215. Cloarec-Heiss, F., 1982. Emphase et condition en banda-linda. Bulletin de Socie´ te´ de Linguistique de Paris 77, 365–375. Cloarec-Heiss, F., 1986. Dynamique et e´ quilibre d’une syntaxe: le banda-linda de Centrafrique (Descriptions de langues et monographies ethnolinguistiques, 2). SELAF, Paris/Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Guthrie, M., 1970–1971. Comparative Bantu. Gregg International, Farnborough (4 vols.). Heine, B., Reh, M., 1984. Grammaticalization and Reanalysis in African Languages. Buske, Hamburg. Meeussen, A.E., 1967. Bantu grammatical reconstructions. Africana Linguistica 3, 79–121. Mon˜ ino, Y., 1995. Le proto-gbaya. Essai de linguistique comparative sur vingt-et-une langue d’Afrique Centrale. Langues et cultures africaines, 20. Peeters, Paris. Ruelland, S., 1992. Description du parler tupuri de Mindaore´ , Mayo-Kebbi (Tchad). Phonologie, morphologie, syntaxe. Ate´ lier national de re´ production de the`ses. Universite´ de Lille III, Lille (The`se d’Etat, Universite´ de Paris III). Samarin, W.J., 1986. The source of Sango’s be. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 12, 205–223.
Stefan Elders Afrikanistik 1, Universita¨t Bayreuth, D-95440 Bayreuth, Germany E-mail address: [email protected] (S. Elders) Available online 17 December 2003
Book review Les manie`res d’ ‘‘eˆtre’’ et les mots pour le dire dans les langues d’Afrique Centrale (LINCOM Studies in African Linguistics, 31) Paulette Roulon-Doko, LINCOM Europa, Mu¨nchen/Newcastle, 1998, 160 p., ISBN 3-89586-520-6 This book is a collection of articles about how concepts of being are expressed in selected Adamawa-Ubangi languages from Central Africa. Adamawa-Ubangi is one of the subfamilies of Niger-Congo (cf. Boyd, 1989). All authors belong to the French Centre National de Recherche Scientifique and have long-standing experience with the languages they discuss. Diki-Kidiri is first-language speaker of Sango. The volume is structured as follows: Introduction (Marcel Diki-Kidiri and Paulette Roulon), Banda (France Cloarec-Heiss), Zande (Raymond Boyd), Yakoma (Pascal Boyeldieu), Sango (Marcel Diki-Kidiri), Gbaya (Paulette Roulon-Doko), Tupuri (Suzanne Ruelland). Concepts of being are expressed in these languages by several means: the juxtaposition of a subject and a non-verbal predicate, by a predicative marker or by a verb. The order of presentation of the languages goes from concepts of being marked by verbs only (Banda) to concepts of being never marked by a verb (Tupuri). Banda does have juxtapositional nonverbal predicates, but as Cloarec-Heiss (1986: 393–395) remarks, they are marginal. In their introduction, Roulon-Doko and Diki-Kidiri classify notions of being into the following functional domains (‘‘valeurs’’): existential, identifying, presentative, equational and situative, the latter covering notions linked to adpositional phrases, such as locative and comitative. They observe that none of these functional domains is associated with a particular structure in these languages and that it is not possible to reduce the different systems to a single organising scheme (p. 14–15). The presentation of the data is therefore guided by the structure of the individual languages. All articles start from the forms indicating notions of being and then deal with their semantic correlates. Grammaticalisation phenomena are regularly observed. As Diki-Kidiri and Roulon-Doko observe in their introduction, verbs of being in these languages are generally irregular (loss of lexical meaning, partial loss of verbal features). Diki-Kidiri classifies verbs of being in Sango on a scale from verb-like to less verb-like. Irregular verbs of being in Sango take tonal tense/aspect/mood marking like regular verbs. They are therefore still morphologically distinct from predicative markers (p. 97). Boyd (1989: 38, note 3) observes that a root du with meanings such as ‘stay’, ‘sit’, ‘be’ is well attested in Ubangi languages. Its behaviour in the individual languages differs: Yakoma shows a synchronic polysemy, stay, live, exist, be’, according to the syntactic 0024-3841/$ – see front matter # 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2003.08.001
1430
Book review
environment. All examples with, exist, be’ in Yakoma are incidentally conditional clauses (p. 75). In closely related Sango, du is in principle restricted to a non-real, wished state. The verb du means, be there’ in Zande. Apart from a verb of being with a general meaning, some of these languages (Yakoma, Sango, Gbaya) have verbs of being adding aspectual notions (‘stay’, ‘be still’, ‘be yet/be not yet’, ‘become’) or modal notions (Sango volitive ‘be’, Gbaya potential ‘be’). Sango uses the verbs ‘fall’ and ‘come’ with an attributive predicative for ‘become rapidly’ and ‘become’, respectively (pp. 108–109). The term ‘‘inchoative’’ would be more adequate for this use than the term perfective used by Diki-Kidiri. Predicative markers generally constitute a heterogeneous group because they are defined negatively with respect to verbs. I would like to point out the equational marker nga´ a` in Zande (pp. 50–57): it may function as a copula, as a determiner in noun phrases, as an introducer for adjuncts referring back to a subject or a topicalised noun phrase and as a complementiser for reported speech. This syntactic multifunctionality would be a nice testcase for alternative approaches to grammatical semantics: is it one morpheme with an invariant meaning, operating different syntactic environments (as Boyd does) or should it be seen as a morpheme or several morphemes whose uses have developed by grammaticalisation? Several languages have juxtaposition of subject and non-verbal predicate. As word order in noun phrases is often Head-Modifier, the order noun þ other noun/modifier may in theory lead to ambiguous constructions. Boyd (1989: 42) is the only author to discuss such problems. Sango and Yakoma prefer specific subjects in juxtapositional sentences, which delimits the subject from a nominal predicate. Some non-verbal predicates and complements of verbs of being show a special grammatical behaviour. Predicate adjectives in Banda (p. 23) and in Yakoma (p. 67) must be definite, while predicative adjectives in Zande show pronominal agreement with a pronominal antecedent (p. 59). A few languages admit verbal nouns as non-verbal predicates and this makes the delimitation of verbal and non-verbal predicates a delicate case. Yakoma uses it for a near future (p. 71) and for a passive-impersonal construction (pp. 73, 80). Tupuri has a similar type of passive-impersonal construction: a juxtapositional sentence where the predicate is ‘with’ þ verbal noun (pp. 141–142). A striking feature of the verbal noun in this construction is that it distinguishes completive and incompletive, marked by a tone pattern on the verbal noun. Tonal tense/aspect/mood marking is a regular feature of verbs in Tupuri (Ruelland, 1992) and the verbal noun in the passive-impersonal construction must have copied it from verbal sentences. The inflectional marking on the verbal noun suggests that the passive-impersonal construction should be analysed in a strictly synchronic approach as a stative verbal sentence, with a non-active subject and an aspect-marked nominalised verb. Constructions indicating being often show a particular behaviour with respect to negation. Zande and Tupuri have special negative forms for non-verbal sentences. Gbaya has a potential verb which is used in a negative sentence, in combination with a negative particle. Though some languages do not have negative counterparts of the existential (Banda) and the presentative (Tupuri) or, if so, only rarely (identifying sentences in Yakoma), other
Book review
1431
languages do have negative counterparts of these constructions: negative presentative in (Zande), negative existential (Yakoma, Sango). Verbs of being and predicative markers are essential in the structuring of sentences and discourse. There are several cases where a verb of being or a predicative marker is part of a grammaticalised construction. Given the attention that has been paid to grammaticalisation in African languages (Heine and Reh, 1984 and later publications by Heine and his collaborators), it would be interesting to see how verbs of being are used as a source for other grammatical markings in these Adamawa-Ubangi languages. 1. Tense/Aspect/Mood marker: Progressive marker in Banda (pp. 26–27); Obligative ‘He has to come’ in Sango (p. 102); Hypothetical and Consecutive in Gbaya (p. 114); Presentative between subject and verb in Gbaya (pp. 118–119); 2. Presentative: ‘be at’ to a presentative marker in Zande (pp. 45–47); 3. Relative marker: ‘be at’ to a relative marker in Zande (pp. 43–45); existential þ demonstrative in Banda to a relative/demonstrative (p. 27); 4. Focus marker: equational to focus marker in Banda (pp. 30–31) and Tupuri (pp. 151– 152); presentative to focus marker in Yakoma (pp. 80–82) and Zande (pp. 45–47); 5. Conditional marker: from cleft sentence to conditional marker in Banda (pp. 32–34); 6. Causal marker: Sango: identifier to causal conjunction in Yakoma (p. 83) Sango (p. 93); Gbaya: existential þ conjunction with fused subject pronoun introduces and links clauses of a narrative (p. 118); 7. Dubitative marker: Banda: when the identifying verb occurs between ‘say that’ and a complement clause, it indicates the non-commitment of the speaker towards the content of the complement clause (p. 34); Sentence-final identifier to emphatic interrogative in Sango (p. 93) and to dubitative marker in Banda (pp. 34–35). Some of the forms indicating being are borrowings. Cloarec-Heiss (1982) suggests on several occassions an influence of neighbouring, unrelated Central Sudanic languages on Banda. The verb ye`ke` in Sango is borrowed from Kikongo (Samarin, 1986), tu`ru`neˆ ‘change into’ in Yakoma is from French tourner (p. 78). The form nga´ a` ‘equative’ in Zande suggests that it has been borrowed from neighbouring Bantu languages. Meeussen (1967: 115) reconstructs comparative gga`(-) ‘like’ for Proto-Bantu, while Guthrie presents two relevant comparative Bantu forms: gga`- ‘become like’ (Comparative Series 753, Guthrie, 1971, vol. 2: 126; Guthrie, 1970, vol. 3: 201) and gga`- ‘as, like’ (Comparative Series 2263, Guthrie, 1970, vol. 4: 243). The predicative marker nı¯ in Zande is either a borrowing from Bantu or a genuine Ubangi form, that is cognate with the Proto-Bantu form. Relevant reconstructions are the Proto-Bantu affirmative predicative index nı´(-) (Meeussen, 1967: 115) and Proto-Gbaya ne´ ‘eˆ tre (essentiel) pre´ dicatif’ (Mon˜ ino, 1995: 665). In conclusion, this collection of articles is a valuable contribution to the description of African languages, to comparative Adamawa-Ubangi linguistics as well as to typology and grammaticalisation studies. All articles contain a wealth of examples, taken from texts, proverbs and everyday language. The form-to-meaning approach is a very useful model for the description of similar phenomena in other African languages. The concentration on a single language family illustrates well to what extent a grammatical domain may vary across a language family.
1432
Book review
References Boyd, R., 1989. Adamawa-Ubangi. In: Bendor-Samuel, J. (Ed.), The Niger-Congo Languages. University Press of America, Lanham, MD, pp. 178–215. Cloarec-Heiss, F., 1982. Emphase et condition en banda-linda. Bulletin de Socie´ te´ de Linguistique de Paris 77, 365–375. Cloarec-Heiss, F., 1986. Dynamique et e´ quilibre d’une syntaxe: le banda-linda de Centrafrique (Descriptions de langues et monographies ethnolinguistiques, 2). SELAF, Paris/Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Guthrie, M., 1970–1971. Comparative Bantu. Gregg International, Farnborough (4 vols.). Heine, B., Reh, M., 1984. Grammaticalization and Reanalysis in African Languages. Buske, Hamburg. Meeussen, A.E., 1967. Bantu grammatical reconstructions. Africana Linguistica 3, 79–121. Mon˜ ino, Y., 1995. Le proto-gbaya. Essai de linguistique comparative sur vingt-et-une langue d’Afrique Centrale. Langues et cultures africaines, 20. Peeters, Paris. Ruelland, S., 1992. Description du parler tupuri de Mindaore´ , Mayo-Kebbi (Tchad). Phonologie, morphologie, syntaxe. Ate´ lier national de re´ production de the`ses. Universite´ de Lille III, Lille (The`se d’Etat, Universite´ de Paris III). Samarin, W.J., 1986. The source of Sango’s be. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 12, 205–223.
Stefan Elders Afrikanistik 1, Universita¨t Bayreuth, D-95440 Bayreuth, Germany E-mail address: [email protected] (S. Elders) Available online 17 December 2003