Towards a Typology of DIE Verbs in African Languages

This paper constitutes an essay in comparative lexical semantics and typology, comparing DIE verbs in nine African languages: Arabic, Tigrinya, Hausa, Dinka, Maa, Chindali, Kinyarwanda, Yoruba, and Akan. Cross-linguistically, DIE verbs, although referring to the same human event, differ in their aspectual structure. Primary DIE verbs, representative of Vendler's class of achievement verbs, provide not only an interesting case study of a single lexical verb, but also an excellent exemplar of the class type. The author proposes that the four types of DIE verbs identified also constitute the potential range of all achievement verbs

Variation and Word Formation in Proto-Bantu: The Case of *-YIKAD-

This article is published with the permission of the author

On the notion “inchoative verb” in KinyaRwanda

This article is published with the permission of Peeters Publishers.Certain verbs in KinyaRwanda—kú-rwáàrà “to be(come) sick” and gú-túùrà “to live/reside,” for example—have been considered by many linguists (cf. Coupez 1980, Overdulve 1976, Kimenyi 1973) to be stative verbs. The present analysis suggests that it would be better to consider them as “inchoative verbs,” of which three sub-classes can be defined according to linguistic evidence proper to KinyaRwanda itself. The significant aspect of the characterization of inchoatives is the punctual nature attributed to the nucleus of the events named by these verbs; a phenomenon which determines to a great extent their observed linguistic behaviour

Between agreement and case marking in Lamnso

Lamnso, a language in the Grassfields branch of Southern Bantoid, has a system of noun classes marked by (C)V affixes that attach to the stem. Noun modifiers agree with the noun by attaching a comparable affix that matches the class. This type of NP-level concord is typical of Bantu languages. At the clausal level, (C)V markers that are identical in form to those appearing at the NP-level appear as enclitics on virtually all nouns in a sentence. Though these markers are identical, it is argued that they serve separate functions, marking agreement on subject nouns before the verb and case on oblique object nouns after the verb. Direct objects and nouns in locative expressions are not marked. Typological evidence in the form of a grammatical relations hierarchy is discussed in support of these claims