The African trading community in Guangzhou: An emerging bridge for Africa-China relations

This article analyses an emerging African trading community in Guangzhou, China. It is argued that migrant communities such as this one act as linguistic, cultural and economic bridges between their source communities and their host communities, even in the midst of tensions created by incidents such as immigration restrictions and irregularities. Socio-linguistic and socio-cultural profiles of this community are built, through questionnaire surveys and interviews, to address issues such as why Africans go to Guangzhou, which African countries are represented, what languages are spoken there, how communication takes place between Africans and Chinese, what socio-economic contributions Africans in Guangzhou are making to the Chinese economy, and how the state reacts to this African presence. Following from the argument that this community acts as a bridge for Africa-China relations it is suggested that both the Chinese and the African governments should work towards eliminating the harassment of members in this community by many Guangzhou law enforcement officials and instead harness the contributions of this community to promote Africa-China socio-economic relations. © 2010 The China Quarterly.published_or_final_versio

The syntax of nominalized complex verbal predicates in Dagaare

Nominalization and verb serialization are widely attested phenomena in the generative linguistic literature, but an in-depth study of their interaction remains to be undertaken. Based on data from Dagaare, a Gur language of West Africa, this paper analyzes a type of complex predicate construction, nominalized serial verbs, in which only one of the verbs carries a nominalization affix. With this, a number of issues about the nature of complex predicatehood, syntactic alternations, and lexical categorial differences involving nouns and verbs across languages are addressed. The paper proposes that, basically, serial verb nominalizations are VPs headed by a NomP functional projection.postprin

Interactivity in Web-based Teaching of Linguistics Courses

Many current digital Information Communications Technologies (ICTs), including the web, have become integral tools in the pedagogical process. Four main features of modern digital ICTs make them stand out as very useful educational tools. These are integration of multimedia, flexibility of use, connectivity, and interactivity (Blurton 1999). This paper focuses on interactivity. Drawing from three years of web-based design of linguistics courses at the University of Hong Kong, it is argued that enhanced interactivity is the single most important reason why university teachers should practise web-based teaching alongside traditional face-to-face classroom teaching. Interactivity has been the subject of much discussion in constructivist approaches to teaching and learning which rely on more active participation in the learning situation on the part of the learner (Daniel and Marquis (1983), Moore (1992), Wagner (1994), Markwood and Johnstone (1994), Barnard (1995), Parker (1999) and Brogan (1999). A novel notion of conversational learning community as a kind constructivist learning environment is introduced. It is shown that instructional interactivity, defined as active communication in a conversational learning community between instructor(s), learners, course materials, and links to remote experts and resources, is a central aspect of the learning situation. This conceptualisation has important consequences for course design and delivery. We interpret our web-based course design, using WebCT, as a practical implementation of this new notion of conversational learning community. Main features of the WebCT that highlight this central notion of interactivity are outlined. It is concluded that web-based teaching actually enhances interactivity both within and beyond the classroom setting.published_or_final_versionCentre for Information Technology in Education, University of Hong Kon

Serial verb reduplication in the Mabia languages of West Africa

This paper introduces and discusses the notion of Serial Verb Reduplication (SVR) in two Mabia languages of West Africa, Dagaare and Kusaal. The authors show that the phenomenon of SVRs, though under-represented in the literature, has a wide scope occurrence in natural language usage within serializing languages. Theoretically, two lexical semantic notions: semantics of verbs (verb meaning) and pluraction, are advanced to explain the intricacies of the syntax and semantics of SVRs. The paper identifies two groups of SVRs: canonical SVRs and pluractional SVRs and proposes that semantically bleached verbs can only be reduplicated in pluractional benefactive and causative SVRs in these languages

Relativization in Dàgáárè and its typological implications: Left-headed but internally-headed

This article examines in detail the syntax of relativization in Dàgáárè, a Mabia (Oti-Volta) language of the Gur branch in the Niger-Congo family. The main aims of our investigation are twofold. The first is to describe a cluster of typologically interesting syntactic features of relativization in Dàgáárè in the light of the fact that no detailed description exists in the literature. The second is to demonstrate that relative clauses in Dàgáárè are head-internal relative clauses (HIRCs), even though they are, on the surface, postnominal relative clauses, like those in English. Thus, they are not of the in-situ type of HIRC that is well known in the literature. We call this type of relative clause a left-headed HIRC. This type of relativization has rarely been noticed cross-linguistically in the previous literature and therefore is of considerable significance for general linguistics, linguistic typology, as well as theoretical linguistics. Evidence comes from coordination in possessor relativization and PP relativization. Our discovery shows that Universal Grammar allows left-headed HIRCs as an option in addition to the more familiar types: in-situ HIRCs and head-external relative clauses (HERCs). © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.postprin

Documentation is Documentation and Theory is Theory: A Reply to Daniel Avorgbedor's Commentary "Documenting Spoken and Sung Texts of the Dagaaba of West Africa"

In a response to an article that appeared in Empirical Musicology Review (Bodomo and Mora 2007), Avorgbedor (2007) takes issue with aspects of the paper. In our reply to Avorgbedor’s response we will firstly clarify some issues raised therein and secondly address the issue about the relationship between theory, description and documentation within linguistics and musicology

Prosodic morphology in Dagaare

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We are what we eat: food in the process of community formation and identity shaping among African traders in Guangzhou and Yiwu

In this paper we analyze two African communities in Guangzhou and Yiwu, China, arguing that among Guangzhou Africans on the one hand, Black Africans, particularly West Africans, have a tighter community and interact more with each other than Black Africans in Yiwu. On the other hand, Maghrebian Africans in Yiwu have a tighter community and maintain a more cohesive interaction than their counterparts in Guangzhou. Evidence for this characterization of the communities comes from food and communal food-eating habits. There are hardly any West African restaurants in Yiwu while there is an abundance of West African and other Black African restaurants in Guangzhou where there is more community patronage. In contrast, there are more concentrations of North African restaurants in Yiwu than in Guangzhou. We discuss the crucial role food and food-making and eating places play in providing structures and avenues for community bonding to promote community formation and community identity shaping. © 2012 Adams Bodomo & Enyu Ma.postprin

On Nominalizing the Serial Verb in Mabia Languages

Verb serialization and nominalization are two prominent phenomena in descriptive and theoretical syntax. This paper raises a number of issues that result from the interaction between these two widely attested phenomena in the literature: nominalization (e.g. Chomsky 1970, Roeper 1993, Alexiadou 2011, Lieber 2016) and verb serialization (e.g. Foley and Olson 1985, Baker 1989, Bodomo 1993, Lord 1993, Collins 1997, Stewart 2001, Foley 2010, Haspelmath 2016). Based on data from Dagaare and Kusaal, two Mabia languages of West Africa, this paper analyses a serial verb construction which is a type of complex predicate construction in which all the verbs in a series are nominalized, with only one of the verbs carrying the nominalization affix (Bodomo and Oostendorp 1993, Bodomo 2004, Hiraiwa, Bodomo 2008, and Abubakari 2011). Such a rare complex predicate construction is then the basis for renewed questions about the nature of complex predicatehood, diathetic syntactic alternations, and lexical categorial differences involving nouns and verbs across languages. The paper proposes a syntactic representation of these nominalized serial verbal predicates in which the verbal predicates are basically interpreted as VPs headed by a nomP functional projection.  Semantically, we propose that nominalized serial verbs, like their purely verbal counterparts, express a complex event. It is thus concluded that while verbal and nominal predicates obtain from the same minimal constructs, the difference between pure serial verbs and nominalized serial verbs is due to the fact that a semantic feature, [+nom], parallel to the syntactic functional projection, nomP, imposes nominal features on the whole complex. This analysis is extended to complex verbal constructions in English