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Conative calls to animals: From Arusa Maasai to a cross-linguistic prototype

  • Alexander Andrason, PhD in Semitic Languages, University Complutense in Madrid, Spain (2010); PhD in African Languages, Stellenbosch University, South Africa (2016). The scope of his research includes disciplines such as linguistics, cognitive science, and complexity theory. Within the field of linguistics, he specializes in cognitive linguistics, grammaticalization theory, and typology. He speaks some thirty living languages and has an extensive knowledge of various ancient languages. His language interests include the Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo, Nilotic, and Khoe families. He also works on the documentation and preservation of endangered, minority languages, e.g., Wymysorys (Poland), Arusa (Tanzania), and Tjwao (Zimbabwe).

         and

    Michael Karani, PhD in African languages, Stellenbosch University, South Africa (2018), is a lecturer in Linguistics and Communication Studies at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. His main research areas are language documentation and communication studies. He has published several articles on the Arusa Maasai language, e.g., in Asian and African Studies, Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics, and Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis.
Published/Copyright: March 17, 2022
Lodz Papers in Pragmatics
From the journal Lodz Papers in Pragmatics Volume 17 Issue 1-2

Abstracct

The present article expands our empirical and theoretical knowledge of conative animal calls (CACs) in the languages of the world. By drawing on canonical typology and prototype theory – and by contrasting the original evidence related to the category of CACs in Arusa Maasai with the evidence concerning CACs in other languages that is currently available in scholarship – the authors design a cross-linguistic prototype of a CAC and enumerate its 18 prototypical non-formal (semantic-pragmatic) and formal (phonetic, morphological, and syntactic) features.

Keywords: conative animal calls; interjections; typology; prototype; Maasai; Arusa

About the authors

Alexander Andrason

Alexander Andrason, PhD in Semitic Languages, University Complutense in Madrid, Spain (2010); PhD in African Languages, Stellenbosch University, South Africa (2016). The scope of his research includes disciplines such as linguistics, cognitive science, and complexity theory. Within the field of linguistics, he specializes in cognitive linguistics, grammaticalization theory, and typology. He speaks some thirty living languages and has an extensive knowledge of various ancient languages. His language interests include the Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo, Nilotic, and Khoe families. He also works on the documentation and preservation of endangered, minority languages, e.g., Wymysorys (Poland), Arusa (Tanzania), and Tjwao (Zimbabwe).

Michael Karani

Michael Karani, PhD in African languages, Stellenbosch University, South Africa (2018), is a lecturer in Linguistics and Communication Studies at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. His main research areas are language documentation and communication studies. He has published several articles on the Arusa Maasai language, e.g., in Asian and African Studies, Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics, and Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis.

Acknowledgements

The present article is a result of the research project “Exgram! | The Expressive Grammar of Arusa Maasai: Interjections, Ideophones, and Gesture” (2021-2022), supported by the Department of African Languages at Stellenbosch University.

Abbreviations

1

1st person

C

consonant

CAC

conative animal call

F

feminine

IMP

imperative

INTJ

interjection

PL

plural

PN

proper noun

REL

relative

SG

singular

VOC

vocative

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Published Online: 2022-03-17
Published in Print: 2021-07-27

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. Conative calls to animals: From Arusa Maasai to a cross-linguistic prototype
  4. Bankers communicating wrongdoing and failure: Apologies or apologetics?
  5. Anti-Chinese sentiment in the Czech public service media during the COVID-19 pandemic
  6. The ideological effect of pre COVID-19 metaphors on our perceptions of technology during the pandemic
  7. Metaphor in the written discourse of Arab students at a College of Education in Israel
  8. ZPD-based mediation of L2 learners’ comprehension of implicatures: An educational praxis framework
  9. Compliment Response (CR) patterns among English vs. Persian teachers: Cultural transmission of CR behavior?
  10. Madeiran emigration to South Africa since the 1960s: A sociocultural and linguistic perspective
https://doi.org/10.1515/lpp-2021-0002
Keywords for this article
conative animal calls; interjections; typology; prototype; Maasai; Arusa

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. Conative calls to animals: From Arusa Maasai to a cross-linguistic prototype
  4. Bankers communicating wrongdoing and failure: Apologies or apologetics?
  5. Anti-Chinese sentiment in the Czech public service media during the COVID-19 pandemic
  6. The ideological effect of pre COVID-19 metaphors on our perceptions of technology during the pandemic
  7. Metaphor in the written discourse of Arab students at a College of Education in Israel
  8. ZPD-based mediation of L2 learners’ comprehension of implicatures: An educational praxis framework
  9. Compliment Response (CR) patterns among English vs. Persian teachers: Cultural transmission of CR behavior?
  10. Madeiran emigration to South Africa since the 1960s: A sociocultural and linguistic perspective
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