LINGUIST List 13.664

Mon Mar 11 2002

Review: Lang Description: Hausa

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  • Uwe Seibert, Review of Jaggar (2001) Hausa

    Message 1: Review of Jaggar (2001) Hausa

     Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2002 13:35:14 -0700
    From: Uwe Seibert <Uwe.Seibertcolorado.edu>
    Subject: Review of Jaggar (2001) Hausa


    Jaggar, Philip J. (2001) Hausa. John Benjamins Publishing Company, xxxiv+754pp, hardback ISBN 1-58811-030-3 (US & Canada), 90-272-3807-3 (ROW), USD 182.00, EUR 200.00, London Oriental and African Language Library 7 Announcement at http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-347.html#1

    Uwe Seibert, Visiting scholar, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Colorado at Boulder

    In the introduction to this book, we are informed of the fact that Hausa "is one of the best documented and most extensively researched of all sub-Saharan African languages, and has been the subject of serious study for 150 years" (p. 3).

    And indeed, the number of monographs and articles written on Hausa, the largest Chadic language, could easily outweigh the number of articles and monographs written on all the other 150+ Chadic languages put together.

    As Hausa is one of the most widely taught African languages in universities worldwide, there are already a number of pedagogical grammars, dictionaries and readers available in several languages. In recent years, two major reference grammars have been produced, one in German (Wolff 1993) and one in English (Newman 2000).

    The benefit of this latest reference grammar of Hausa by Philip J. Jaggar, a long-time lecturer of Hausa at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, to me lies not so much in presenting new facts about Hausa, but rather in displaying the structural and functional characteristics of Hausa in a comprehensive and instructive manner, using theory-neutral terms.

    Like most other works on Hausa before, it describes the Kano dialect, which is considered to be the "standard" Hausa and is the variety used in the media and taught in Hausa courses. Features of the other dialects are mentioned at different points however.

    The outline of the book is as follows:

    1. Introduction 2. Phonology 3. Classification of Nouns 4. Simple Nouns and Adjectives: Gender and Number 5. Nominal and Adjectival Derivation 6. Tense, Aspect, Mood (TAM) System 7. Verb Grades 8. Verbal Nouns, Deverbal Nouns and Infinitives 9. Noun Phrase Syntax 10. Personal Non-Subject Pronouns 11. The Syntax of Simplex Clauses 12. Focus, Questions, Relativization and Topicalization 13. Clausal Complements 14. Clausal Coordination and Subordination 15. Adverbial Functions: Adverb Phrases, Prepositional Phrases, Noun Phrases 16. Selected Texts

    A very detailed table of contents (20 pages) and a large index (15 pages) allow the reader to find the topics s/he is interested in at a glance. At the end of the book is a 24-page bibliography which not only lists all the major works and articles on Hausa, but also unpublished M.A. and Ph.D. theses and articles in less readily available journals.

    Throughout the book, Jaggar provides plenty of examples taken from a variety of oral and written sources, reflecting contemporary Hausa usage. These examples are written in the standard Hausa orthography; tone, length and the difference between the two Hausa "r" sounds is marked in addition. Interlinear glosses are given where they are needed to clarify the structure in question, but not throughout, in order to save space and avoid redundancy. Someone who doesn't know Hausa may prefer more glosses, but this would have largely increased the size of the book, which already is more than 700 pages!

    A few comments on some of the chapters:

    Chapter 4 offers an excellent description of the intricate system of forming noun plurals in Hausa. Jaggar demonstrates how about 40 different plural formations can be reduced to 14 major classes, some of them having subclasses according to syllable weight and other phonological features.

    In chapter 6, Jaggar describes the formation of tense, aspect and mood not only in terms of their structural paradigms and their basic function and meanings, but also in terms of their distribution in discourse, an issue that has received little attention in Hausa studies so far.

    In chapter 7, he treats the complex system of forming derived verbal stems by adding suffixes to a basic verb, noun, or adjective. "Verb grades" in Hausa are shown to code directionality (ventive-centrifugal and "efferential"), transitive and intransitive, totality, and partitive. Their behavior in different syntactic environments -- very puzzling for a Hausa learner -- is described in a very helpful way.

    In chapter 9, among other things, Jaggar describes indefinite and definite determiners and their discourse function and illustrates how demonstratives code a four way contrast between "near me the speaker", "near you the hearer", "distant from me & you", and "remote-distal from me & you".

    Chapter 13 contains a very detailed typology of clausal complements based on Giv�n (1980) and Schuh (1998). Jaggar distinguishes between aspectual, causative, permissive and prohibitive verbs, verbs of emotion, intention, attempt and control, verbs of cognition and perception, modal complement taking expressions, direct and indirect speech, and cognate complements.

    Chapter 16 offers just a very tiny sample of written Hausa texts: a 19th century letter and a tale both in Arabic letters and the Standard Hausa Orthography, and a modern newspaper article and poem in the Standard Hausa Orthography, all with interlinear gloss and free translation. But this is perfectly o.k., since a number of Hausa readers already exist.

    Jaggar gives references to the major sources whenever a new topic is treated. This allows the reader to go deeper into the history of Hausa description and to compare Jaggar's treatment of, e.g. the Hausa TAM system, noun plurals, verb grades, etc. with other scholars' findings and treatments.

    The book is well-designed and very readable. It may be a bit too advanced for a beginning student of Hausa, but intermediate and advanced students and anyone who wants to get a thorough knowledge of Hausa will find it extremely helpful and worth buying, despite its high price.

    Scholars (like me) working on other Chadic languages will find it very helpful, too, as a model for their own description of closely related languages. We all know how far we lag behind compared to the depth of Hausa studies, so let's get on with it and produce works of a similar quality!

    REFERENCES Giv�n, Talmy. 1980. The binding hierarchy and the typology of complements. Studies in Language 4(3): 333-77.

    Newman, Paul. 2000. The Hausa Language: An Encyclopedic Reference Grammar. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

    Schuh, Russell G. 1998. A Grammar of Miya. (University of California Publications in Linguistics, 130.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

    Wolff, H. Ekkehard. 1993. Referenzgrammatik des Hausa (Hamburger Beitr�ge zur Afrikanistik, 2.). M�nster and Hamburg: LIT.

    ABOUT THE REVIEWER Uwe Seibert became interested in Hausa and other Chadic languages while studying African languages at the University of Marburg (Germany). Between 1989 and 1996, he went to Central Nigeria several times to study languages of the Ron group of Chadic. He received his PhD from the Department of African Linguistics of the University of Frankfurt in 1997, his thesis was a description of the morphology, syntax and discourse features of the Daffo variety of Ron. From 1998-2000 he worked as a Research Fellow at the Department of Linguistics of the University of Jos, Nigeria. Presently, he is a visiting scholar at the Department of Linguistics of the University of Colorado at Boulder and works on a comparative study of "verbal extensions in Chadic".