Date: 14-Apr-2010
From: David Erschler <erschlergmail.com>
Subject: Aspects of Dagbani Grammar
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Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/19/19-2991.html
AUTHOR: Olawsky, Knut J.TITLE: Aspects of Dagbani GrammarSUBTITLE: With special emphasis on phonology and morphologySERIES TITLE: LINCOM Studies in African Linguistics 41PUBLISHER: Lincom GmbHYEAR: 2008 (1999)
David Erschler, Independent University of Moscow, Russia
INTRODUCTION
The book under review is a re-edition of Olawsky's 1998 Düsseldorf doctoralthesis. The book is very far from being a reference grammar, but despite 10years since its first publication it still remains the principal source ofreference on Dagbani, a Northern Gur language of Northern Ghana. Since then,only a few works on Dagbani have appeared (Olawsky 2002; Hyman & Olawsky 2003;Olawsky 2004; Hudu 2005; Purvis 2007; Purvis 2008).
The book is addressed primarily to Gur scholars. As the presentation is oftenrather sketchy, a typologist in need of Gur data to include in her or his samplewould probably have to look for a more comprehensive grammar.
SUMMARY
After a short introduction there follows chapter 2, Lexicon and Syntax. Thischapter lists the principal grammatical categories of the language (nouns,verbs, adjectives, adpositions, various types of pronouns). The somewhatmysterious distinction of ''true'' and ''false'' adjectives is cleared up in Olawsky(2004). A separate section of the chapter deals with verb functions (tense,aspect, and modality). Further, main features of Dagbani syntax are described:it is mostly head-initial (SVO, nouns precede adjectives, however, there existboth prepositions and postpositions). Two phenomena strike me as unusual(probably they are less surprising for experts on Gur): first, special markers(depending on the TAM characteristics of the verb) show up when the verb isclause final (p. 31, the gloss FIN is mine):
(1) a.o nyu_ri_ komhe drink.IPF water'He drinks water.'
b. *o nyurihe drink.IPF'He drinks.' (intended)
c.o nyu_ra_he drink.FIN'He drinks.'
It should be noted, however, that verbs in all examples illustrating thisphenomenon are either transitive or unergative; it is unclear what happens tounaccusative ones.
The second surprising phenomenon is that interchanging the subject and theobject of a sentence sometimes produces a passive reading (and does not alwaysinterchange the roles of the agent and the patient, as it might be expected)
(2) inversion producing the ''normal'' semantic effect, p. 65:a.paga maa nya adamwoman DEF see Adam'The woman saw Adam.'
b.adam nya paga maaAdam see woman DEF'The woman saw Adam.'
(3) inversion producing the passive reading, p. 65:a.bugim di buafire burn goat'Fire burnt a goat.'
b.bua di bugimgoat burn fire'A goat was burnt by fire.'
The factors governing the choice of one of the readings are not discussed, butOlawsky conjectures that such 'passive inversion' is allowed only when thedistribution of thematic roles can be unambiguously derived from the context.
Chapter 3, Morphology: In the first section of this chapter main grammaticalcategories of the language are listed again. In Section 2, the author describesthe inflectional morphology. He deals first and foremost with nouns, refiningthe extant definition of Dagbani noun classes (Wilson 1972). Dagbani has anumber of semantically non-transparent noun classes, characterized withparticular singular and plural suffixes: pag-a woman-SG / pag-ba woman-PL, class2a in Olawsky's numbering (p. 84), gab-ga rope-SG 'rope', gab-si rope-PL'ropes', class 3a (p. 85), etc.
The subsection on the verbal morphology begins with a description of aspectmarkers. Then the imperative form is discussed (it is not mentioned at all inthe section on verbal functions in ch. 2, and the prohibitive marker is absentfrom the subsection on negation in ch. 2, p. 49).
Section 3 describes the derivational morphology. Listed are suffixes used fornoun derivation. For verbs, only the causative suffix is mentioned. It remainsunclear from the text whether verbs form an open class and if so, how new verbscan be formed.
Section 4 lists possible types of compounding in Dagbani. This information isused later in the section on tone in chapter 4. All compounds listed here arenouns.
Section 5 discusses reduplication. Olawsky shows that reduplication is not aproductive phenomenon in Dagbani.
Section 6 deals with numerals. The last section of this chapter describes anexperiment on mental representation of noun classes using nonce-words.
A long chapter 4 is subdivided into 2 parts. The first part, Prosodic Structure,treats syllable types, stress, and tone (mostly in isolated nouns and nounphrases).
Olawsky shows that Dagbani usually has penultimate stress. The few exceptionswith the stress on the ultimate syllable are analyzed via catalexis (i.e.positing a fictitious additional final syllable), p. 177. Later it is shown thatsuch nouns demonstrate certain irregularities with respect to their tone patternas well, and this effect is also explained using catalexis, p. 190.
The language possesses a two-tone system. A pre-OT autosegmental analysis of itis presented on pp. 195-229. This analysis is extended to verbs in Hyman &Olawsky (2003).
The second part, Segmental Phonology, discusses the phoneme inventory of thelanguage. It touches on some subtle issues of phonemic status of certain soundsand describes the ATR harmony in Dagbani. The conclusion is ''that the solelyphonetic status of vowel harmony must be emphasized, whereas this phenomenonseems to play a more dominant role in other Gur languages'', p. 249.
The book ends with the bibliography (pp. 272-283; books specifically on Dagbani;other linguistic literature, and books in Dagbani are listed separately), a mapof Ghana (p. 284), the complete list of noun classes (pp. 285-286), a list ofreduplications (p. 287), a list of contributors (p. 288), Abbreviations (pp.289-290), and a subject index (pp. 291-293).
EVALUATION
The book contains a lot of extremely interesting data but a number ofunfortunate decisions make it less informative and harder to read than it couldotherwise be.
The first of them is the tendency of the author to use the orthography withoutdoubling it with the morphonological transcription: as Olawsky shows (see, forinstance, p. 13), the orthography is rather inexact, and potentially importantinformation is thus probably lost to non-experts on Dagbani. The decision ismotivated by Dagbani's being a written language: ''literacy has been makingprogress recently and has to be promoted by all means'' (p. 6). I am inclined todoubt that choosing the imprecise orthography over the morphonological orphonetic representation in a book whose primary audience are linguists is aparticularly efficient way of promoting literacy among Dagbani speakers.
Orthographical examples are put in angular brackets, phonological/morphologicalrepresentation in slashes, and IPA phonetic transcription in square brackets. Ittook me some time to memorize which type of bracket stands for which. Thephonetic transcription is apparently often inexact, as it tends to disregard theATR harmony.
Another decision that seems to me unfortunate is to avoid marking tone in allsections of the book except the one specifically dealing with tone.
The reading of the book is not facilitated by very small print and the somewhatstrange layout.Turning to more substantial issues, the book seems to suffer from a number ofomissions and occasional unclear arguments. I will mention here only some ofthese points, for the purpose of illustration.
Syntax of adverbs is not treated separately anywhere, and it is only fromexamples that a reader may deduce that they probably follow the verb. Without aspecial discussion it is unclear why ''time depth markers'' (p. 34: 'earlier sameday', 'one day away', etc.) are not a subclass of adverbs but a closed categoryon its own. In the section on focusing (3.3.7., p. 64) only examples of time andplace adverbials are given. It is unclear whether others types of adverbs can befronted as well, what is the ordering of adverbs, etc.
An argument that struck me as odd is that the ''about to'' particle _yen_ isdenied the status of tense marker on the reason of its ability to co-occur witha time-depth marker (p. 33). However, examples (52 c,f) on p. 35 show that thefuture marker _ni_ can also co-occur with them.
On p. 19, it is stated that ''Adpositions can be either prepositions orpostpositions, the latter type of which occurs directly after the noun.''However, examples on pp. 17-18 show that 'true' adjectives also placedimmediately postnominally. I wonder whether it means that ''directly after thenoun'' should actually read ''directly after the noun phrase'' or that adjectivesand postpositions are in complementary distribution.
p. 48: ''Whereas raising sentences admit a 'dummy' subject (, cf. (23), atable of pronouns), control verbs require a 'normal' NP, i.e. the subject as thecontroller is a pronoun or a noun (NP). Raising verbs in this sense are notattested in Dagbani (…).'' As no examples of ''raising verbs'' are given toclarify the point the statement remains rather confusing.
The work (Vogel 1997) quoted on p. 27 is absent from the bibliography.
All of that probably does not create any difficulties for Gur scholars but makethe book not an easy read for the non-initiated. However, the book presents morethan enough data to whet a typologist's appetite. It remains to hope thatsomeday a full scale reference grammar of this fascinating language will bewritten and published.
REFERENCES
Hudu, Fusheini. 2005. Number marking in Dagbani. MA thesis. University of Alberta.L.M. Hyman & Knut Olawsky. 2003. ''Dagbani verb tonology''. In Chege Githiora,Heather Littlefield & Victor Manfredi (eds.), Trends in African Linguistics 4,97-108. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, Inc.Olawsky, Knut J. 2002. What is a word in Dagbani? In: Word. A cross-linguistictypology, edited by R. M. W. Dixon and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 205-226.Olawsky, Knut. 2004. What is a noun? What is an adjective?. Problems ofclassification in Dagbani. JALL 25 (2004), 127-148Purvis, Tristan Michael. 2007. A Reanalysis of Nonemphatic Pronouns in Dagbani.In and Stephen Wechsler (eds) The Proceedings of the Texas Linguistic Society IXConference: The Morphosyntax of Underrepresented Languages. pp. 239-264. CSLIPublications. Stanford, CA.Purvis, Tristan Michael. 2008. A linguistic and discursive analysis of registervariation in Dagbani. Ph.D. thesis, Indiana University.Wilson, W.A.A. 1972. An introductory course to Dagbani. Tamale: GILLBT.
ABBREVIATIONS
FIN marker of the clause-final position of a verbIPF imperfective aspectNP noun phraseOT optimality theoryPL pluralSG singular
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
David Erschler holds a PhD in Mathematics from Tel Aviv University, Israel. He is a lecturer at the Independent University of Moscow, Russia. His main interests include Ossetic syntax, areal influences on Ossetic grammar, Uralic languages, and syntactic typology.
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