Abstract
This paper reviews inclusory constructions and pronouns in the Mande language family and proposes a diachronic account of their development. Inclusory constructions, which are found in several Mande languages, are a type of conjunction strategy where the whole set of participants – the superset – and a subset of participants are expressed, as in Dan-Gwetaa yāā Gbȁtȍ ‘Gbato and I’, lit. ‘we Gbato’. In a number of Southern and Southwestern Mande languages, inclusory constructions are typologically unique, as they feature a separate series of inclusory pronouns, which are used exclusively in this construction. The paper argues that these inclusory pronouns are a Southwestern Mande innovation, which spread to other Mande languages through contact.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the two reviewers of the present paper, as well as two other reviewers of a previous version of the paper, for their helpful criticism, as well as for pointing me to missing pieces of data. Two of the reviewers are anonymous, and the other two are Dmitry Idiatov and Michael Cysouw. I would like to thank my colleagues for giving their most valuable feedback on Mande languages: Maxim Fedotov, Maria Konoshenko, Nadezhda Makeeva, Daria Mischenko and Valentin Vydrin. I am thankful to Bridget Drinka, Ivan Kapitonov, Mihail Kopotev, Tatiana Nikitina, Konrad Rybka, Ivonne Treis, and Martine Vanhove for having read and commented the manuscript at different stages of its preparation. I gratefully acknowledge Tanya Panova’s help in creating the language map and Jack Rueter’s help in language revision. I am indebted to the Fyssen Foundation and William F. Hanks at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as to the University of Helsinki for supporting my research. Last but not least, I would like to extend my gratitude to Pe Mamy and his family, as well as other speakers of Mano for teaching me their language.
Abbreviations
- af
actor focus
- aor
aorist
- assoc
associative
- aut
autonomous
- bas
basic
- com
comitative
- conj
conjunctive
- el.
elicited example
- emph
emphatic
- exi
existential
- h
high tone
- IC
inclusory construction
- IP
inclusory pronoun
- jnt
joint
- l
low tone
- nat.
natural example
- NP
noun phrase
- p.n.
proper noun
- pos
positive
- PP
post-/prepositional phrase
- qual
qualitative
- tm
terminal marker
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Appendix
Tonal marking in Mande examples.
Name of the tone | 2-level systems | 3-level systems | 4-level systems | 5-level systems |
---|---|---|---|---|
(Maninka) | (Mano, Guro) | (Kla-Dan) | (Dan-Gweetaa) | |
Ultrahigh | a̋ | a̋ | ||
High | á | á | á | á |
Mid | ā | ā | ||
Low | à | à | à | à |
Ultralow | ȁ | ȁ | ȁ |
Personal pronouns, affixes and auxiliaries in Kpelle.
1sg | 2sg | 3sg | 1pl.excl | 1pl.incl | 2pl | 3pl | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Personal pronouns | |||||||
Autonomous | yɛ́ | yǎ~yàǎ | kúó | gùó | káá | dìé | |
Topic-1 | ŋ́wɛ́í | éwɛ̌í | ŋ̀wɛ̌í | kúwɛ̌í | gǔwɛ̌í | káwɛ̌í | dǐwɛ̌í |
Topic-2 | ɲááŋ́ | yɛ́ŋ́ | yàáŋ́ | kúóŋ́ | gùóŋ́ | kááŋ́ | dìéŋ́ |
Possessive | ŋɔ́~ŋá~ŋé | éwɔ́ | ŋɔ̀~ŋà | kúwɔ́ | gùwɔ́ | káwɔ́ | dìwɔ́ |
Inclusory | – | – | – | kwà | gwà | kà | dà |
Citational | gɛ̂ | yɛ̂ | yɛ̀ | kúô | gùò | káà | dìè |
Auxiliaries | |||||||
Affirmative | |||||||
Basic | ŋé | é | è | kú | gǔ | ká | dǐ |
Resultative | ŋàǎ | yàǎ | àǎ | kwàǎ | gwàǎ | kàǎ | dàǎ |
Habitual | ŋǎ | yǎ | ǎ | kwǎ | gwǎ | kǎ | dǎ |
Imperative | – | ∅~ɓè | ě | – | kà gwě ~ kàgú ~ gwě | kà | dǐ |
Conjunctive | ŋé | é | ě | kú | gǔ | ká | dǐ |
Neutral | gɛ́ | yɛ́ | yɛ̌ | kúó | gùó | káá | dìé |
Negative | |||||||
Basic negative | vé | hwé | hwě | kùhwé | gǔhwé | káhwé | dǐhwé |
Habitual negative | vǎ | hwá | hwǎ | kúhwǎ | gǔhwǎ | káhwǎ | dǐhwǎ |
Neutral polarity | |||||||
Conditional | ŋà | yà | à | kwà | gwà | kà | dà |
Pronominal indexes | |||||||
(ŋ́-) | é- | (ŋ̀-) | kú- | gǔ- | ká- | dǐ- | |
Forms of the postposition ɓà ‘on’ | |||||||
ḿáà~ḿíì | yɛ̂ | m̀à | kúô | gùô | káà | dìê |
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The dance of expressive adverbials (“ideophones”) in Jamsay (Dogon)
- Prefixal articles across domains: Syntactic licensing in Albanian
- The Great Complement Shift and the role of understood subjects: The case of fearful
- Inclusory pronouns in Mande: The emergence of a typological rarum
- Genre-related language change: Discourse- and corpus-linguistic perspectives on Austrian German 1970–2010
- Variation in the acoustic correlates of emphasis in Jordanian Arabic: Gender and social class
- Article-like constructions and the definite-indefinite continuum in Croatian
- The variation of calques in European languages, with particular reference to Spanish and German: Main patterns and trends
- Book Reviews
- Laurie Bauer: Compounds and compounding
- Elisa Mattielo: Analogy in word-formation: A study of English neologisms and occasionalisms
- Douglas Biber and Bethany Gray: Grammatical complexity in academic English