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Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 18:29:34 +0100 (MET) From: Harald Hammarström <haha2581@student.uu.se> Subject: Some Aspects of the Grammar of Zina Kotoko
EDITOR: Schmidt, Bodil Kappel; Odden, David; Holmberg, Anders TITLE: Some Aspects of the Grammar of Zina Kotoko SERIES: LINCOM Studies in African Linguistics 54 PUBLISHER: Lincom GmbH YEAR: 2002
Harald Hammarström, Graduate School of Language Technology, Chalmers University of Technology/Gothenburg University
OVERVIEW
The collection of articles is aimed at describing Zina Kotoko, a Chadic language of Cameroon. It differs markedly from other descriptive grammars in that it is not the result of fieldwork where the language is spoken; in contrast, it is built by a group of linguists in Tromsø, Norway and draws exclusively on one patient native speaker ''Habi'' who happened to be a student at Tromsø. In addition, Prof. Henry Tourneux is thanked in the preface for providing copies of unpublished material from his fieldwork on Kotoko languages, especially on plural formation. Unfortunately, I was not able to obtain the same materials from Prof. Tourneux so I cannot say what exactly the input from him is. Nevertheless, the book presents an interesting case in point; what can you achieve without (sometimes) expensive and/or cumbersome fieldwork?
As the title suggests, the book does not aim to span over all areas of the Zina Kotoko language. And, in fact, more than half of the pages in the book are not devoted to descriptive linguistics, but instead discuss how aspects of Zina Kotoko grammar conform to various theoretical frameworks espoused by the authors. The theoretical orientation of the authors is very strong -- the merits and demerits of which will be discussed individually. None of the authors is a Chadic specialist or even specializing in African linguistics, except for Odden who has done very impressive amounts of fieldwork on African (and other) languages.
SYNOPSIS AND DISCUSSION
Introduction The non-specialist authorship has implications visible in the introduction. We don't get the usual extensive history of the speakers and history of research on the language and related languages. The introduction has some ethnographic information, but it is brief and sometimes vague. Information on classification is taken verbatim from other works and no history of research is presented. This would be easy even for an amateur to look up. For example, by far the earliest material on a Kotoko language is that of Seetzen from before 1816, most accessible as ''Seetzens Áffadéh: Ein Beitrag zur Kotoko- Sprachdokumentation'' (Sölken 1967). Zina Kotoko does not appear as a named distinct variety neither in (Teßmann 1932) nor (Jungraithmayr and Ibriszimow1994). An extensive cultural account is Lebeuf (1976).
Just as in other descriptive grammars information on intelligibility to neighbouring varieties is given. It is a pity that we are not told whether this is Habi's testimony or something else (no reference is cited). If it had been based on fieldwork one would have assumed that many people from different lects had given their opinion, but in this case we'd like to know explicitly. The lect at hand is then variously called the Kotoko language or Zina dialect in individual chapters, further blurring the status.
The phonology section is authoritative with minimal pairs, examples and comments on allophonic variation. I have no trouble understanding the phonological personality of Zina Kotoko, which turns out to be that of a typical Chadic language, and the suggested orthography is straightforward. Some unresolved questions remain, such as the nature and extent of schwa-deletion. Understandably, authors in later chapters differ on this point and will not be commented on further.
After phonology, the introduction gives a typological sketch of the language. It is a bit uneven, as it presents pages of examples of morphological paradigms (more than in the relevant chapter), and the selection of features shows a skewed orientation, i.e. we are not told anything about passives but we are about wh-movement and null- subjecthood.
David Odden: The Verbal Tone System of Zina Kotoko The chapter describes the tonal patterns associated with different morphological tenses of the verb in Zina Kotoko. This turns out to be determined by a complex interaction between lexical, tense-specific, and phonological features. The description goes through each tense in turn, first gives plenty of examples, then an empirically argued tonal analysis and lots of comments. The comments are brain dumps, freely mixing comments on description, discussing of a proposed consonant hierarchy, exceptions, phonetic level analysis and underlying-level analysis, unsure issues, rules and the relation of one rule to another (some rules being formalized and some not), comments on typological prevalence, and how different tense patterns relate to one another. I have read the chapter three times and I still get lost immediately in the jungle of cross-referencing thoughts (entirely typical examples: ''when the initial consonant of a polysyllabic stem is a non-depressor, the first stem tone surfaces unchanged as M, since the underlying tone does not lower after voiceless consonants'' (p. 25), ''As in the recent past, the initial tone is underlying M which lowers after a depressor, and since the rule involved in M-tone lowering, implosives are included in the class of depressors.'' (p. 26)). It's better to read the summary at the end, which is perfectly clear on the overall system, and then use the rest of the chapter as an encyclopedia. After all, you will want all matters relating to the tones of, say, the future tense, gathered in one section, and if the factual matters happen to be exceedingly complex, so be it.
Berit-Anne Bals and Helene Norgaard Andreassen: Reduplication in Progressive Verb Forms in Zina Kotoko The author aims to describe reduplicated structures in Zina Kotoko within the Optimality Theory (OT) framework. Without being well-read on OT, I have no trouble understanding how, what and when items are reduplicated in Zina Kotoko, especially since there are plenty of examples. The discussion of OT-this-and-that in a descriptive grammar is not disturbing here, but the chapter could of course be much shorter without the OT-analysis, which the conclusion describes as not wholly successful anyway (p. 57).
Mark Andrew de Vos: Notes on Noun Morphology and Clefting Constructions in Kotoko The noun morphology part adds little to the information on the same issue in the introduction. What's worse, it is frequently inconsistent with the description in the introduction: * màtàngì is 'cat' on p. 60 but 'male cat' on p. 8 (where corresponding female form is also given). * cákárá is 'hen' p. 60 but 'female chicken' on p. 8 * àwà 'goat' p. 60 but 'female goat' p. 10 Even basic lexical items are cited inconsistently as: * 'house' is sg. mwa pl. màmáwì on p. 61 but sg. mwá pl. màmàwì on p. 9 Also basic vocabulary: * 'person' is sg. mamala pl. matə́m on p. 62 but sg. màmalá pl. mə́tə́m p. 8 * 'horse' is sg. bùskùn pl. bùsàkwán on p. 63 but sg. bùskún pl. bàsàkwán on p. 9 * 'boy' is árvə̀ on p. 63 but àrvə̀ on p. 9 * 'girl' is hə̀ni on p. 63 but hə̀nì on p. 9 Finally, on p. 64 various forms are given by de Vos which are inconsistent with forms given by de Vos himself on earlier pages (on maniwi on p. 62 is cited, for some reason, without its tones as on p. 61).
The lexicon at the end of the book agrees with the forms in the introduction but it is not stated who wrote the introduction or the lexicon. It's apparent that we can't trust the de Vos's knowledge of the language, but hopefully he is correct on the outlines of NP agreement and clefting constructions which he is more interested in than tones. Provided the examples are correct, I have no trouble following how NP agreement and clefting constructions work.
Girma A. Demeke: The Syntax of DPs The chapter by Demeke is the weakest in the book. We are told in the introductory paradigms (p. 72) that ''Note that Kotoko is a tonal language. However I will not mark tones in this work for a number of good reasons, unless it is very crucial to contrast between my data, such as singular versus plural nouns''. There are no ''good'' reasons to fail to mark phonemic tones.
The author makes a lot of random remarks on similarities to other languages e.g English and Amharic. Similarities to other languages are interesting but they should be made in a systematic manner and not in that of an uninformed opportunist. Imagine an archaeologist, upon finding a spoon in China, remarking ''funny, I have seen spoons in contemporary Sweden too''. Claims should neither be spurious, false or relevance-wanting, such as haphazard ''many Afroasiatic languages'' (p. 74) or ''most languages'' (p. 75).
The theoretical orientation is disturbing in this chapter. For example, upon noting that you can, just like in Italian, use a definite article plus a possessive pronoun (''the my book'') in Zina Kotoko (p. 76), the author speaks of ''the traditional explanation'' in complete ignorance of explanations outside a structural framework. As a matter of fact, Haspelmath (Haspelmath 1999) has suggested a functional explanation for exactly the phenomenon at hand, and this should at least have been mentioned.
Glossed examples occur often enough for us to pick up good information on how (toneless) articles, adjectives, demonstratives and genitives work in Zina Kotoko.
Florin Oprima: Notes on VP Syntax Oprima has a more honest excuse for excluding tones (p. 106), ''Due to inability to hear them correctly, tones are not represented'' but I can't help thinking that it would have been preferable if the chapter had been written by a linguist who can actually hear tones.
Oprima describes the verb phrases in Zina Kotoko well. A lot is in there, such as adverbs, negation and notes on what is ungrammatical where one could have expected otherwise.
The theoretical orientation does not distract from description. However, one has to wonder about the merits of the theory when the conclusion says (p. 127-128): ''I argued in [section] 4 that the sentential negation is quite high structurally in Kotoko. Since the infinitival constructions can be negated using the sentential negation, they must contain the NegP, which means the nominal affix attaches higher than NegP. However, we have just seen that this suffix must attach lower then AgrP, which, in its turn, is lower than NegP. It looks like the nominal affix must be simultaneously high and low. At present, I do not have any answer to this paradox.''
Bodil Kappel Schmidt: Zina Kotoko Tense/Aspect This chapter is a satisfactory descriptive acount of the usage of verbal forms to various T/A-functions in Zina Kotoko. There is no spurious theorizing, functional or structural, that distracts from the description.
Anders Holmberg: Prepositions and PPs in Zina Kotoko This chapter is a sufficient account of prepositions, which commendably also includes passing references to other Chadic languages and non-Chadic geographically adjacent languages. Prepositions in Zina Kotoko often consist of two parts, where the second part may originally all be nouns, perhaps typically denoting body parts. Holmberg gives examples on prepositions involving and head and back (there are more), then notes (p. 162) ''that a preposition 'on' is derived from the word for head is very common cross-linguistically'' (no reference given). Had the chapter been written by an Africanist, surely he/she would have been familiar with e.g. Heine's work (Heine 1997) and known that not only 'on' from head is common, but the other ones too.
Helene Norgaard Andreassen: Pronouns All is good except the section on interrogatives which is too short (e.g what about 'how'? ) and indefinite pronouns are not discussed at all.
GENERAL REMARKS
We can now better address the question posed in the beginning of the review; what can you achieve without (sometimes) expensive and/or cumbersome fieldwork? Obviously, the work in question is much better than nothing and as such it is a significant contribution to our knowledge of languages of the world. But it is also obvious that it could be much better under the very same circumstances.
There is no comparative work/connection to earlier descriptions and no attempts to trace influence from Musgum, Kanuri or Shoa Arabic. The lexicon contains some obvious items ultimately from Arabic ('but' àmá, 'forty' àrbàim, 'hundred' myà, 'first' áwálàha, 'chair' kúrsìw, 'time' sá'à and French lèkól, tábəl) but it is far from clear to me through what language(s) and when they are likely to have come. Granted, comparative work doesn't have to be in the scope of a descriptive study, but it should be in this case, as the authors (e.g de Vos) frequently speculate on the derivation of certain phenomena without any investigation into other relevant languages.
It is, of course, also the case that the scope of the book is not full description but also to show how various aspects of Zina Kotoko fits into such and such theoretical grammar model. While it is important to test theories, doing so presupposes description. All authors admit reservations, saying that their description is not complete and that more research is needed. If parts of description are cancelled, the theory is not well tested and, doubtlessly, much more information on Zina Kotoko could have been gathered instead. On the other hand, having a theoretical interest may actually lead to a better description as the interest may spur deeper and wider investigation. I see some small signs thereof in this work, but not to the extent that it would supersede an experienced descriptive linguist.
MINOR ERRORS
* Wrong/inconsistent gloss for mùsè lèkól (p. 134) * References to Ethnologue (p. 2, 14) should be accompanied by year and edition * Some lexical items in the chapter don't appear in the lexicon e.g: arga (p. 107) * Several references on p. 34 have place and publisher confused, e.g: Augustin: Glückstadt, Academic Press: New York and SIL & Univerity of Texas: Arlington * References on p. 57 have a different, odd, typographic convention with a colon after the year (instead of point) but no point after pp., e.g: Ohala, John J. 1989: ''Sound ...'', .., pp 173-198 * There is a missing full stop on p. 72 ''In addition, though, I will not discuss the word order issue in detail I will assume that at the PF interface all languages ...'' * Missing footnotes (p. 106)
REFERENCES
Haspelmath, M. (1999). Explaining article-possessor complementarity: Economic motivation in noun phrase syntax. Language 75(2), 227-- 243.
Heine, B. (1997). Cognitive Foundations of Grammar. Oxford University Press.
Jungraithmayr, H. and D. Ibriszimow (1994). Chadic Lexical Roots, Volume 20 of Sprache und Oralität in Afrika: Frankfurter Studien zur Afrikanistik. Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin. 2 vols.
Lebeuf, J.-P. (1976). Études kotoko, Volume 16 of Cahiers de L'Homme. École des hautes Études en sciences sociales, Mouton, Paris.
Sölken, H. (1967). Seetzens Áffadéh: ein Beitrag zur Kotoko- Sprachdokumentation, Volume 64 of Veröffentlichung / Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Institut für Orientforschung, Berlin.
Teßmann, G. (1932). Die völker und sprachen kameruns. Petermanns Geografische Mitteilungen 78, 113--120, 184--190.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Harald Hammarström is a PhD Student in Computational Linguistics at
the Depertment of Computing Science at Chalmers University of
Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. His current research topic is
Unsupervised Learning of Concatenative Morphology but interests go
significantly wider and include linguistic typology and computational
linguistics in general.
