Description grammaticale de la langue Ngbaka Phonologie, tonologie et morphosyntaxe

Marcel Henrix, Karel van den Eynde, Michael Meeuwis

The language described here is Ngbaka (/Ngbaka minagende/), spoken in the centre of the Ubangi region in the Democratic Republic of Congo by approximately one million speakers. The language constitutes a subgroup, designated as "Gbaya-Manza-Ngbaka, belonging to the Ubangi branch within Adamawa-Ubangi (formerly Adamawa-Eastern)". The description is based on the first author's field work and linguistic immersion, over fifty years, in the Ngbaka community.

The grammar has three parts: Phonology and tonology; Non-verbal morphosyntax; Verbal morphosyntax. In the first part the phonemic and tonemic system of Ngbaka is described, and a full account of syllable structure is given. The morphosyntactic parts offer a form-based description (positions, tone patterning, combinatory processes, formal and functional proportionality). The description of the non-verbal morphosyntax proceeds from the notion of "referential group" (consisting of a "referential base" and an optional "referential extension"). For both the referential base and its extension a constituency analysis is offered. The other categories of non-verbal constituents (prepositions, ideophones, adverbs, …) are dealt with in the last subsection of part 2. Part 3 offers a detailed account of verbal morphosyntax.

After the discussion of the general characteristics (phonemic/tonemic/morphosyntactic) of the verb forms and conjugation patterns, follows the description of complex predicates. The final subsection of part 3 deals with the free morphemes expressing tense, aspect and modality.

ISBN 9783895861802. LINCOM Studies in African Linguistics 70. 112pp. 2007.