Refine
Year of publication
- 2014 (23) (remove)
Document Type
- Part of a Book (23) (remove)
Language
- English (23) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (23)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (23)
Keywords
- Inversionsfigur (9)
- Multistability (9)
- Multistable figures (9)
- Syntax (9)
- Wahrnehmungswechsel (9)
- Bantusprachen (6)
- Aspect seeing (3)
- Thema-Rhema-Gliederung (3)
- Erkenntnistheorie (2)
- Figure of thought (2)
Institute
- Informatik (1)
Inversion constructions in Bantu have been discussed from a variety of perspectives over the last decades. Well-known construction types include locative inversion and subject-object reversal, while more recently semantic locative inversion and instrument inversion have been described. Theoretical studies of Bantu inversion constructions have focused on different aspects of the construction, including the licensing and grammatical function, information structure properties and the formal characteristics of pre- and postverbal NPs. With respect to the status of preverbal NPs in inversion constructions, different analyses have probed the status of the NP as subject or topic, or, more recently, as the subject of a Predication relation. The present paper summarises and compares different analyses of the preverbal domain in inversion constructions and brings out empirical and conceptual similarities and differences. In addition, different analyses are related to comparative studies of Bantu inversion constructions, so as to probe how attested variation across Bantu relates to findings of different formal accounts. The paper aims to summarise current research on the preverbal domain in inversion constructions and to indicate directions for future work.
This paper deals with the general topic of subjectivity and subjectivation, considered through a philosophical tradition opposed to the 'philosophies of consciousness': that is, a philosophical tradition, from Spinoza to Althusser, that rejects as a myth the supposed primacy and presocial character of subjective identity.
Nsong is a western Bantu language spoken in the neighbourhood of Kikwit (5°2'28"S 18°48'58"E, Kwilu District, Bandundu Province, DRC) and encoded as B85d in the New Updated Guthrie List (Maho 2009). To this B80 or Tiene-Yanzi group also belongs Mbuun, encoded as B87 by Guthrie (1971: 39) and spoken in the wider vicinity of Idiofa (4°57'35"S 19°35'40", Kwilu District, Bandundu Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo). Both languages are closely related. They share a high percentage of fundamental and other vocabulary as well as several rather atypical phonological innovations (Bostoen & Koni Muluwa 2014; Koni Muluwa 2014; Koni Muluwa & Bostoen 2012). Preliminary elicitation-based research on Mbuun has pointed out that the pre-verbal domain plays a crucial role in the marking of argument focus in Mbuun (Bostoen & Mundeke 2011, 2012). In this paper, we assess whether this is also the case in Nsong on the basis of a text corpus which the first author has been collecting, transcribing and annotating in 2013 and 2014 as part of an endangered language documentation project funded by the DoBeS program of the Volkswagen Foundation through a 3-year grant (2012-2015). More information on the project can be found on http://www.kwilubantu.ugent.be/. This Nsong text corpus exclusively consists of oral discourse and currently counts 48.022 tokens and 11.973 types. The team’s 2013 fieldwork aimed at documenting Nsong speech events in as many different cultural settings as possible. As a result, the corpus comprises different text genres, such as political speeches, historical traditions, folk music, tales, proverbs, hunting language, ceremonial language used during circumcision and twin rites, and popular biological knowledge. In line with previous research on Mbuun, we concentrate here on mono-clausal argument focus constructions, even if preliminary research has pointed out that bi-clausal focus structures are more common in the Nsong corpus.
Nen and Nyokon are unique among the Bantu languages in allowing full nominal objects between the tense/aspect marker and the verb. Despite the fact that the two languages are neighbours and related they make different use of this positional option. In Nen the position is the default one for objects and the post-verbal position renders an object discrete and suitable for quantified objects and for contrast. In Nyokon the position before the verb is functionally equivalent to the one after the verb. The difference is related to the fact that Nyokon allows the preverbal object only in certain tenses whereas in Nen it is not restricted. But contrasted objects in Nyokon too appear after the verb. There is a construction in which both positions are filled with a constituent. This construction is modelled on a secondary predication construction.
This paper deals with left and right dislocation in Embɔsi, a Bantu language (C25) spoken in Congo-Brazzaville. The prosody of dislocation has gathered considerable attention, as it is particularly informative for the theories of the syntax-prosody mapping of Intonation Phrases (a.o. Selkirk, 2009, 2011; Downing, 2011). Concentrating on selected Bantu languages, Downing (2011) identifies two main phrasing patterns. She primarily distinguishes languages in which only right dislocated phrases display a lack of prosodic integration ("asymmetric" languages), from languages in which both left and right dislocations phrase separately ("symmetric" languages). Hiatus avoidance processes, boundary tones and register expansion/reduction indicate that Embɔsi displays a somewhat more intricate phrasing pattern. In this language, both left and right dislocated items sit outside of the Intonation Phrase formed by the core-clause, but only the latter form their own Intonation Phrase. We also discuss the prosody of multiple dislocations (i.e. with two dislocated arguments), which have not so far received all the attention they deserve. What we observe in Embɔsi is that either the two dislocated items phrase together and are not integrated to the core Intonation Phrase, or only the outermost dislocated element phrases separately.
Proportional determiner quantifiers in German allow interpretations that violate the conservativity universal of Keenan and Stavi (1986). I argue for an analysis that distinguishes between surface syntax and the logical form of sentences. I show that in surface syntax, German non-conservative quantifiers are determiners that form a constituent with a noun phrase and share case and agreement properties with the noun phrase. But I propose that at logical form the non-conservative determiners undergo an adverbialization movement and are interpreted by a mechanism that generalizes focus-a ected quantification of Herburger (2000). This result refines the understanding of conservativity as a constraint on interpretation.
The present paper aims at describing different pre-verbal focus strategies in Kisikongo (H16a), spoken in the vicinity of Mbanza Kongo, northern Angola. This western Bantu language is part of the Kikongo Language Cluster (KLC), stretching from southern Gabon to northern Angola, including Cabinda and parts of Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa. Kikongo exhibits a clause-internal pre-verbal argument focus position, which has rarely been reported in Bantu languages, except in Mbuun (B87) (Bostoen and Mundeke 2012) and Nsong (B85d) (Koni Muluwa and Bostoen, this volume), both spoken in the neighboring Kwilu region of the DRC. The more extensively studied eastern and southern Bantu languages generally have a post-verbal argument focus position (cf. Watters 1979, Morimoto 2000, Creissels 2004, Güldemann 2007, Buell 2009, van der Wal 2009, among others). In addition to this mono-clausal argument focus strategy, Kisikongo also relies on different bi-clausal constructions to focus arguments, i.e. cleft-constructions.
The children's book "Duck! Rabbit!" dramatizes the lesson that just because one is right, others don’t have to be wrong. An endless dispute is quickly settled once the quarrellers experience an aspect change or gestalt switch and thereby realize that the same picture can be seen in different ways. This simple scenario offers an intriguing model for arbitrating between conflicting positions by going back and forth between different aspects and thereby realizing that conflicting accounts can be equally valid.
In 1989 the triumphant discourse on the 'end of history' brought the death of socialism and the expansion of liberal democracy. The proclamation of the end of history could also be read literally, as the death of 'history' as a discipline with a homogenized narrative. It is in the same year that Pierra Nora wrote a groundbreaking article, which disentangled the fundamental opposition between history and memory, and at the end assumed the standpoint of memory. The article departs from the diagnosis of post-Yugoslav contemporary accounts of Yugoslav and partisan events. The critique of nationalist and Yugonostalgic discourses discloses shared assumptions that are based on the 'romantic' temporality of Nation and on history as a closed process. In the main part of the article the author works on the special, multiple temporality of partisan poetry that emerged during the WWII partisan struggle. The special temporality hinges on the productive and tensed relationship between the 'not yet existing' - the position of the new society free of foreign occupation, but also in a radically transformed society - and the contemporary struggle within war, which is also marked by the fear that the rupture of the struggle might not be remembered rightly, if at all. The memory of the present struggle remains to be the task to be realized not only for poets, but for everyone participating in the struggle. This is where the revolutionary temporality of the unfinished process comes to its fore, relating poetry to struggle, but again producing a form of poetry in the struggle.
Locative inversion in Cuwabo
(2014)
This paper proposes a detailed description of locative inversion (LI) constructions in Cuwabo, in terms of morphosyntactic properties and thematic restrictions. Of particular interest are the use of disjoint verb forms in LI, and the co-existence of formal and semantic LI, which challenges the widespread belief that the two constructions cannot be found in the same language.