Jeff Good

... [2] I borrow the notion of a buffer zone from Stilo (2004). ... concord was often less regular than that of Bantu, the noun prefixes often differed from the well known Bantu ones, and singular and plural classes could often not be paired into genders in the characteristic Bantu fashion. ...

... [4] The gloss abbreviations used in this presentation are as follows: Gloss Abbreviations CVConverb DX Deictic ... However, many verbs are complex, intrinsically consisting of an auxiliaryverb and a preceding deictic proclitic ... Also, multiple items are allowed to occur in position 3. ...

Reassessing Western Beboid∗ Jeff Good Jesse Lovegren University at Buffalo University at Buffalo jcgood@buffalo.edu lovegren@buffalo.edu ... [1] The Western Beboid area, also known as Lower Fungom, is given on right (map based on (Hombert 1980:84), with minor updates)

The introductory chapter lays the groundwork for later discussion, and the primary support for the Strong Linearity Domain Hypothesis comes from three case studies. The first of these is an examination of the ordering restrictions of three verbal extensions found on the Bantu ...

Page 1. The languages of the Lower Fungom region of Cameroon: Grammatical overview Jeff Good University at Buffalo jcgood@buffalo.edu Jesse Lovegren University at Buffalo Jean Patrick Mve University of Yaounde Carine Nganguep Tchiemouo University of Yaounde ...

Design conclusion• A sufficient flexible computational tool for morphological analysis requires the ability for morphophonological generalizations to be made mostly independent from morphosyntactic ones• Morphophonology: maps surface forms to strings of abstract morphemes• Morphosyntax: maps strings of abstract morphemes to syntactic/semantic information (feature structures)

This paper presents a general model for the structure of the traditional descriptive grammar based on a survey of four printed grammars, each of which was chosen as representative of a different "genre": a "best-practice" grammar, Haspelmath's (1993) Lezgian grammar; a grammar representing the traditions of a specific area/family, Maganga and Schadeberg's (1992) grammar of Kinyamwezi, a Bantu language; a grammar from the Routledge Descriptive Grammars series, Huttar and Huttar's (1994) grammar of Ndyuka; and a "legacy" grammar, Williamson's (1965) grammar of Ijaw, which remains an important resource for the language despite making use of a dated syntactic formalism.

Metadata is a new word based on an old concept. Any summary of the contents of a library or archive, like a card catalog, contains metadata. It is the preferred term of the technical community to refer to ``card-catalog'' data, and it will, therefore, become increasingly used as more technical tools are developed for linguistic research. The purpose of this document is to provide a non-technical introduction describing what metadata is, what the general linguist should know about it, and also to describe some aspects of the metadata standard used by the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC).

There has been a fair amount of research on the prosodic systems of contact
languages in recent years (see, e.g., Devonish, 2002; Good, 2004; Gooden, 2003;
and Remijsen & van Heuven, 2005, among others). And, at least among the
Atlantic creoles, such investigation has yielded interesting results. For example,
both Saramaccan and Papiamentu have been claimed to have typologically
unusual, and fairly complex, word-level prosody (Good, 2004; Remijsen & van
Heuven, 2005). To some extent, such results should not be particularly surprising.
The accentual word-level prosody of European superstrate languages was often
quite distinct from that of creole substrates, in particular African tone languages,
creating a typological clash potentially open to a range of resolutions (see Hyman
(2006) for a recent overview of word-prosodic typology). Furthermore, exposure
to prosodic features of the superstrate languages by substrate speakers would have
been particularly extensive. Every utterance from a superstrate native speaker
would have evinced important aspects of a language’s prosodic system. One
would, therefore, expect some degree of transfer of the superstrate prosodic
system into an emerging contact language. But, at the same time, one of the
surface phonetic correlates of accent in European superstrates, pitch, would have
been associated with a phonologically quite distinct entity in many substrates,
tone. What the grammatical outcome should be of contact between such systems
is not at all obvious: How would native speakers of tone languages, for example,
have interpreted the pitch fluctuations they observed in an accentual language?
Answering such a question would be of interest not only to creolists but also to
prosodic phonologists, giving us a clear instance where the study of contact
languages can contribute quite actively to another subfield of linguistics.

Most Bantu languages have a set of highly productive verbal derivational
suffixes which alter the argument structure and semantics of basic verb roots. One example
of such a suffix is the Causative, which gives a verb stem causative semantics and allows
it to take an extra causer argument.

Naki, a mostly undescribed Bantoid language of Northwest Cameroon with SVO as its canonical
word order, makes use of an interesting information-structure encoding construction wherein
a non-object focused element is shifted into immediately postverbal position. In this respect,
Naki is similar to Aghem and Noni, two other languages of the area. However, unlike these
languages, this word order shift is associated with special tone marking on the verb, and, in
transitive sentences, it typically triggers fronting of objects to a preverbal position. This paper
presents an analysis of this construction, situating it both with respect to general properties
of Naki information-structure encoding and with respect to current theoretical approaches to
information-structure sensitive word-order shifts. An important conclusion of the study is that
Naki surface syntax seems better characterized in terms of linear fields than in terms of constituency
trees.

The central question that this paper attempts to address is the
motivation for the statements given above. Specifically, assuming there was a Proto-Hokan, what
evidence is there for the shape of its vowel system? With the exception of Kaufman’s somewhat
equivocal statement above, the general (but basically unsupported) verdict has been that
Proto-Hokan had three vowels, *i, *a, and *u. This conclusion dates back to at least Sapir (1917,
1920, 1925) who implies a three-vowel system in his reconstructions of Proto-Hokan forms.
However, as far as I am aware, no one has carefully articulated why they think the Proto-Hokan
system should have been of one form instead of another (though Kaufman (1988) does discuss
some of his reasons).2 Furthermore, while reconstructions of Proto-Hokan forms exist, it has not
yet been possible to provide a detailed analysis of the sound changes required to relate
reconstructed forms to attested forms. As a result, even though the reconstructions themselves are
valuable, they cannot serve as a strong argument for the particular proto vowel system they
implicitly or explicitly assume.

This paper will propose a model of the “ecology” of documentary and descriptive linguistic
research. I use the term ecology, here, as a designation for the set of individuals, resources,
tools, and actions that are involved in creating, archiving, and using documentary and
descriptive resources.

Turkish exhibits two different sets of subject ‘agreement markers’ which show
different morphosyntactic behavior from each other. It is argued here that one set of these
markers are morphological suffixes while the other set are enclitics. This synchronic analysis is
supported by diachronic facts which indicate that the agreement markers analyzed as suffixes
have been suffixes throughout the reconstructible history of Turkic, while the agreement markers
analyzed as clitics are more recent developments from reduced pronouns. A formal analysis of
how these two sets of agreement markers are employed on Turkish verbs is developed within
Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG).

Certain grammatical patterns are found again and again in the languages of the world. Some of
these patterns recur so frequently that they are given the label “universal”. Explaining the source
of such patterns is clearly an important goal of linguistics, but how to go about doing this is not
obvious. Problems range from the terminological (what sort of patterns should we consider
universal?) to the methodological (what kind of explanation will we accept as sufficient?) to the
theoretical (what role does a universal grammar have in shaping recurrent patterns? what role do
functional considerations play?). How one answers one of these questions will affect how one
answers the others. Can probabilistic generalizations be considered universals? If so, then we
need explanations predicting probabilistic patterns. Are we looking for proximate explanations
(for example, “language A shows pattern X because it inherited it from its parent language”) or
ultimate ones (for example, “language A shows pattern X because only this pattern is permitted
by Universal Grammar”)? Will we assume there is no such thing as Universal Grammar? Then, of
course, we cannot appeal to it for any sort of explanation. Will we assume there is such a thing?
Then, what is its precise structure?

The topic of this chapter is the relationship between data and language
documentation. Unlike many fields of study, concerns regarding data collection
and manipulation play a central role in our understanding of, and theorizing about,
language documentation. The field to a large extent, in fact, owes its existence to
a shift in focus in the goals of linguistic field work from concerns regarding
outputs derived from primary data, like grammars and dictionaries, to the
collection of the primary data itself.

The focus of this rich volume is total reduplication, that is, reduplicative
constructions where one finds two copies of the same element appearing
adjacent to each other in a way prescribed by the grammar of a language, as
opposed to representing mere repetition.1 To pick one example, in Swahili,
total reduplication of an adjective can be used to code plurality of the noun it
modifies (p. 3) rather than merely emphasizing its semantics. The book’s title
both oversells and undersells its content. On the one hand, its areal focus is
limited to Europe. While examples are drawn from languages beyond the
continent, one will not find a global-scale survey of the sort that has become
familiar since the publication of HASPELMATH ET AL. (2005). On the other
hand, there is much more than areal linguistics here. Extensive attention is
given to methodological issues, the literature review brings interesting older
work to light, and, most importantly, the book convincingly demonstrates that
the understudied phenomenon of total reduplication should be brought solidly
into the fold of linguistic patterns worthy of descriptive and typological
attention as part of grammatical “canon”. This last point is especially
significant given that recent decades have seen much more attention paid to
partial reduplication than total reduplication.

The Berkeley Interlinear Text Collector (BITC) is a system for collecting interlinear texts and is especially designed for group collaboration. BITC is installed on a network server, and users access BITC through a web browser, an ideal arrangement for group work since practically anyone can get involved with a group project without having to install special software. The collaborative design of BITC means that all project participants benefit from the texts collected by others working on the project because all work contributes to a shared word list.

The present volume consists of twelve chapters, along with an introduction by the editors, and its
general focus is the relationship between language contact and language change in
morphological and syntactic constructions. Its orientation is broadly functional-typological rather
than formal, though, on the whole, specific theoretical stances are backgrounded in favor of an
emphasis on presentation of the descriptive facts. While the chapters are not of even quality, the
collection would seem to a represent a good snapshot of the current state of functionally-oriented
work in this area.

One of the main goals of The Comparative Bantu Online Dictionary (CBOLD) is to develop a comparative electronic database of Bantu dictionaries and word lists which will allow researchers to examine data quickly across a large number of languages. To that end, we have been developing standards which will allow our sources to be compared with each other even though they were not originally designed for such a purpose. These involve a system for maintaining a distinction between original data and data we have added to a source, expanding existing SGML DTD's for detailed linguistic markup, the use of a <preface> element to store reference information with each of our sources, and the creation of a language metadata element where we can specify which languages the source's data covers as well as state all major alternate names for the relevant languages.

Discussions of endangered languages often frame language death as being associated with the
loss of knowledge as embedded in a particular language. At the same time, it is also clear that the
losses associated with language endangerment need not be restricted to individual language
systems but can also involve the disappearance of distinctive language ecologies. This paper
explores the language dynamics of the Lower Fungom region of Northwest Cameroon, which
offers an extreme case of linguistic diversity within the already exceptionally diverse
Cameroonian Grassfields, focusing on what we can learn by looking at the languages from an
areal and ethnographically-informed perspective. In particular, key aspects of the local language
ideologies will be explored in some detail, and it will be argued that in this area languages are
used to symbolize relatively ephemeral political formations and, hence, should not be taken as
reflections of deeply-rooted historical identities. This conclusion has significance both regarding
how research projects in the area should be structured as well as for what it might mean to
“preserve” the languages of a region which historically appears to have been characterized by
frequent language loss and emergence conditioned by changes in territorial and political
configurations.

It is perfectly reasonable for laypeople and non-linguistic scholars to use names for languages without reflecting on the proper definition of the objects referred to by these names. Simply using a name like English or Witotoan suffices as an informal communicative designation for a particular language or a language group. However, for the linguistics community, which is by definition occupied with the details of languages and language variation, it is somewhat bizarre that there does not exist a proper technical apparatus to talk about intricate differences in opinion about the precise sense of a name like English or Witotoan when used in academic discussion. We propose three interrelated concepts—languoid, doculect, and gloss onym—which provide a principled basis for discussion of different points of view about key issues, such as whether two varieties should be associated with the same language, and allow for a precise description of what exactly is being claimed by the use of a given genealogical or areal group name. The framework these concepts provide should be especially useful to researchers who work on underdescribed languages where basic issues of classification remain unresolved.

An introduction to African languages is a somewhat atypical work that serves, on the one hand,
as a kind of extended scholarly review of a selection of significant linguistic research on African
languages from as for back as Koelle (1854) to the present day, while, on the other hand,
adopting a tone and format more along the lines of an introductory textbook than a book for
specialists.

This paper begins with a presentation of a split in the morphosyntactic behavior of two
suffixing subject pronominal paradigms in Turkish in section 1. In section 2, we argue
that this split is a result of one paradigm consisting of postlexical clitics while the other is
composed of lexical suffixes. To better appreciate the distinct morphosyntactic behavior
of these two paradigms, we will present a brief overview of the historical development
for such bipartite behavior in section 3. We wilI then present an account of it in a
lexicalist framework. namely Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). in section
4. A brief conclusion appears in section 5.