Sagna, Serge orcid.org/0000-0002-7373-7252 (2017) Morphological alternation and event delimitation in Eegimaa. Italian Journal of Linguistics. pp. 53-74. ISSN 2499-8125
Abstract
It is rare for a language to be able to use noun class markers in the nominal domain to categorise entities, and at the same time, use these same linguistic markers to categorise events from the verbal domain. Such a system can be found in Eegimaa and some other related Atlantic languages spoken in the Basse-Casamance area of Southern Senegal, where non-finite verbs and the events they refer to are classified using several different noun class prefixes. In these languages, the use of individual noun class markers as nonfinite verb classificatory markers is lexically determined. But, there are also instances where different noun class prefixes can alternate on verbal stems. Whenever these alternations are attested, one of the alternants must be e-, and the other can be any prefix attested on non-finite verbs, including class prefixes ga- and ba- which are studied here. I show that in these alternations, class marker e- is used to express event delimitation by expressing features such as individuation and telicity which, in the typological literature, have been associated with properties of high transitivity. However, when other prefixes like ga- and ba- alternate with e-, they express values of non-individuation and atelicity which are placed on the lower end of the transitivity scale.
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Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | Uploaded with permission of the publisher/copyright holder. Further copying may not be permitted; contact the publisher for details |
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Institution: | The University of York |
Academic Units: | The University of York > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (York) > Language and Linguistic Science (York) |
Depositing User: | Pure (York) |
Date Deposited: | 13 Dec 2017 13:30 |
Last Modified: | 07 Feb 2025 00:18 |
Status: | Published |
Refereed: | Yes |
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Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:125259 |
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