Historical and Areal Linguistics

Surface SAuxOV orders abound in West Africa. We demonstrate that apparent examples of this word order have important structural differences across languages. We show that SAuxOV orders in some languages are due to mixed clausal headedness, consisting of a head initial TP and head-final VP, though this order can be concealed by verb movement. Other languages are more consistently head-initial, and what appear to be SAuxOV orders arise in limited syntactic contexts due to specific syntactic constructions such as object shift or nominalized complements. Finally, we show that languages which...

This collection contains 36 papers presented at the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics at UC Berkeley from March 23-March 26, 2016.1 This meeting of ACAL coincided with a special workshop entitled “Areal features and linguistic reconstruction in Africa”, and we are glad to include four papers from that workshop in this collection as well. Collectively, these papers add a sizable body of scholarship to the study of African languages, including valuable new descriptions of African languages, novel theoretical analyses of them, and important insights into our...

In this extensive article we survey the major recurrent and interesting phonological properties of African languages.

In this paper I have two goals. First, I propose a reconstruction of the pronoun system of Grassfields Bantu, direct reflexes of which are found in Eastern Grassfields, with a close look at the pronoun systems, as reflected across this varied group. Second, I document and seek the origin of innovative third person pronouns in Western Grassfields. While EGB languages have basic pronouns in all persons, both the Momo and Ring subgroups of WGB have innovated new third person (non-subject) pronouns from demonstratives or perhaps the noun ‘body’. However, these languages show evidence of...