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The Journal of African Languages and Linguistics ( JALL ) was founded in 1979 at the University of Leiden, with Paul Newman as Editor and Thilo Schadeberg as Associate Editor. Foris Publications was the initial publisher. Motivation for launching a new journal came from the fact that whereas African linguistics in the 1970s was thriving, many of the extant African linguistics journals were floundering. From its inception, JALL was conceived of as a broad-based journal of truly international scope. The intellectual underpinnings of JALL can be found in the original editorial statement, reproduced here, and in the work of three major scholars who were closely associated with African linguistics at Leiden, namely Jan Voorhoeve, with his focus on tone, Kay Williamson, with her dedication to on-site fieldwork, and John Stewart, with his emphasis on solid historical linguistics. The scientific principle that underlay JALL at the outset and continued throughout its thirty-year history was a commitment to sophisticated, theoretically-informed empiricism.

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.

A morpheme that plays an important role in the organisation of information structure in the Iraqw sentence is the suffix -o . This suffix is used to indicate the clause that is the scope of negation, of yes/no questioning; the theme of the question; or the constituent that is the basis for comparison. It also indicates the setting of the sentence and appears on sentence adverbials of time or space. It is common on second objects that are not part of the verbal complex. Verbal nouns that occur outside the verbal complex contain this suffix. The suffix indicates the scope over which an operation is valid and excludes other comparable referents from the operation in question. Its verbal counterpart is a suffix -a which is used with verbal negation and questioning.

The system of participant reference expressed in the Ebang verb is unusual in at least two respects. Firstly, distinct slots are used for markers with “pronominal” reference (i.e., 1st, 2nd and 3rd person) on the one hand and noun class “concords” on the other. Each slot can hold at most one marker, and neither slot has a constant syntactic or semantic function, such as subject versus object or agent versus patient. Secondly, an additional marker exists indicating the plurality of some participant, again without being specific about the syntactic role of that participant. A pronominal and a co-occurring plural marker may express reference to two distinct subjects.