Bert Remijsen (aremijse)
Thu 02 Feb 2017, 16:10 - 17:00
DSB 3.10/3.11

If you have a question about this talk, please contact: Mirjam Eiswirth (s1322502)

Shilluk noun morphology and noun phrase morphosyntax

Bert Remijsen, Otto Gwado Ayoker

In this research, we build on recent discoveries in the suprasegmental system of Shilluk to analyse its noun morphology and the morphosyntax of the noun phrase. One of these discoveries is that Shilluk has three levels of vowel length (Remijsen, Ayoker & Jørgensen, under review); the other is that the language has eight distinctive tone categories, two of which are distinguished primarily by tonal alignment (Remijsen & Ayoker 2014).

This unusually rich system of suprasegmental contrasts plays a central role in Shilluk morphology. This can be seen from illustration (1), which presents the inflectional paradigm of the noun gwôk ‘dog’ in the context of an existential predicate. Note that Shilluk nouns present two types of head-marking: a) pertensive, i.e. an inflection which marks the possessed or head term in a possessive noun phrase (cf. Dixon 2010:268); and b) construct state (cf. Creissels 2011), which marks a noun for being modified by most modifiers other than possessors. The pertensive and the construct state forms both constitute the basis for additional inflectional modification. First, the pertensive additionally shows inflectional marking for the number of the possessor, with a High tone target for plural possessors (1b,c). Second, the construct-state form (1d) is additionally marked for proximal demonstrative, through the addition of a Low tone target (1e). The associative inflection, finally, is an instance of dependent marking with a limited distribution (1f).

(1)

a. dâa    gwôk           (base form)

    exist   dog   

‘There is a dog.’

 

b. dâa    gwốook̄      twɔ́ɔŋ           (pertensive, singular possessor)

    exist   dog:pert.s  Twong

‘There is Twong’s dog.’

 

c. dâa    gwóook     mʌ́ʌn          (pertensive, plural possessor)

    exist   dog:pert.p   women

‘There is the women’s dog.’

 

d. dâa    gwốooŋ̄ dwɔ̂́ɔŋ          (construct state)

    exist   dog:cs     big

‘There is a big dog.’

 

e. dâa    gwóooŋ̀          (proximal)

    exist   dog.s:prox

‘There is this dog.’

 

f. dâa    jấaā       gwóook-ɪ́ɪ          (associative)

    exist  those.of  dog-assoc   

‘There are the likes of a dog.’

 

The above summary of the morphological paradigm reveals that the morphology of Shilluk nouns revolves around head marking. The study of Shilluk noun phrases and the variety of modifiers involved yields a range of interesting findings, including the following:

a.·Definiteness is expressed through the selection of alternative modification structures.

b. Adjectival modifiers present a morphologically-marked distinction between on the one hand permanent and contingent forms, reminding of comparable distinctions in Russian and Spanish (involving ser vs. estar);

·c. Numerals are nouns: they have morphological paradigms like the one in (1);

·d. Cardinal numerals are morphologically derived from ordinal numerals through prefixation (e.g. dʌ̀k ‘third’ > á-dʌ̀k ‘three’);

References

Creissels, D. (2009). Construct forms of nouns in African languages. In Peter Austin et al. (eds.) Proceedings of Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory 2. SOAS.

Dixon, R.M.W. (2011). Basic Linguistic Theory – Volume 2: Grammatical Topics. OUP.

Remijsen, B. & O.G. Ayoker (2014). Contrastive tonal alignment in falling contours in Shilluk. Phonology 31(3), 435-462.

Remijsen, B. O.G. Ayoker, & S. Jørgensen (under review). Three-level vowel length in Shilluk. Submitted to Journal of Phonetics.

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