Gerrit J. Dimmendaal

Logophoric Marking and Represented Speech in African Languages as Evidential Hedging Strategies

Logophoric markers are common in two African language families, Niger–Congo and Nilo-Saharan. In addition, they are found in neighbouring Afroasiatic languages. Similar markers have been observed, for example, for Indo-European languages or Japanese. In contrast with a widespread view, I claim that the status of logophoric markers in these African languages differs from that in the latter languages in a number of respects. This, I argue, has important consequences for the way in which logophoricity operates in these languages.

Colourful psi¿s sleep furiously: depicting emotional states in some African languages

This study sets out to investigate the ?poetry of grammar?, more specifically the role of the body in figurative speech, in African languages mainly belonging to Nilotic and Bantu. Apprehending the semantics and pragmatics of metaphorical and metonymic expressions in these languages presupposes an interaction between a number of cognitive processes, as argued below. Interestingly, these languages seem to use these strategies involving figurative speech in tandem with alternative strategies involving on-record statements. This multivocality only makes sense if we place language and language structure more in the social world in which it is used.

Nilo-Saharan Languages

The Nilo-Saharan phylum consists of at least 120 languages spoken in an area covering major areas in eastern and central Africa, with a westward extension as far as the Niger Valley in Mali, West Africa. The genetic unity of these languages was first proposed by Greenberg (1963) on the basis of recurring morphological features and lexical similarities. Nilo-Saharan is essentially Greenbergs earlier Macro-Sudanic (or Chari-Nile) family, together with languages and language groups formerly assigned to historically isolated units.

Differential Object Marking in Nilo-Saharan

Abstract In spite of its widespread nature in the Nilo-Saharan phylum, the differential marking of objects as constituents with or without an explicit case marker has gone virtually unnoticed in the typological literature. The present contribution gives a survey of this economy principle in three Nilo-Saharan subgroups, Fur, Maban, and Eastern Sudanic, where Differential Object Marking extends to ditransitive clauses as well as adjuncts under certain conditions. The governing principles in these Nilo-Saharan languages are in accordance with more general principles of discourse prominence, involving features like animacy and definiteness. But the data from this phylum also suggest that this two-dimensional system needs to be extended into another dimension, the categorical/thetic contrast.

The Leopard's Spots

In this volume, Gerrit J. Dimmendaal discusses the interaction between language, cognition, and culture in an African context with special focus on the cultural construction of meaning through language.