LINGUIST List 14.299

Wed Jan 29 2003

Books: Language Description: Meeuwis

Editor for this issue: Marisa Ferrara <marisalinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. LINCOM.EUROPA, Lingala: Meeuwis

		
Title: Lingala
Series Title: Languages of the World/ Materials 261
			
Publication Year: 2003
Publisher: Lincom Europa
 http://home.t-online.de/home/LINCOM.EUROPA/
			
Availability: Available
 
Author: Michael Meeuwis, University of Antwerp 
				
Hardback: ISBN: 3895865958, Pages: 60pp., Price: USD 34.50 / EUR 29.20
	 / GBP 21.10
Comment: (2nd printing)
			
Abstract:
			
Lingala is a Bantu language spoken in the western and northern
sections of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (including its
capital Kinshasa), in northern Angola, and in the eastern part of the
Peoples Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville). In all these areas
of expansion it has mother-tongue speakers but is at the same time
used by others as a lingua franca. In terms of its history, Lingala is
particularly known for its recent appearance (late nineteenth century)
and the pidgin-like context of its emergence. Structurally, Lingala
shares with neighboring and genetically related languages a
meaning-distinctive role of tone, a vowel system consisting of seven
phonemes, and a use of derivational morphemes to expand the syntactic
and semantic range of verb stems. However, Lingala is often viewed as
an anomaly in the Bantu family because of the remarkably low
complexity of its nominal morphology (i.e., a limited class concord
system). Its verbal morphology, and in particular its temporal and
aspectual inflection, is nonetheless notoriously complex. TAM
distinctions are conveyed through the use of infixes, tone, and
auxiliarization. At the level of syntax, Lingala is marked, among
other things, by a specific way of forming cleft-sentences. The
present volume presents an overview of the phonological, tonological,
and morphological characteristics of this language, and also includes
a section on the main syntactic patterns, as well as a sample text
with morphemic glosses and a translation.
			
Lingfield(s): Language Description
	
Subject Language(s): Lingala (Language Code: LIN)

Written In: English (Language Code: ENG)