Volume 46, Issue 1

Studies on diminutives have primarily focused on European languages and a few African languages. However, the forms and functions of diminutives in the Igbo language remain critically unexplored. This article examines the forms and functions of diminutives in Igbo, as well as accounts for the role of tone in the formation of diminutives in Igbo, using corpus-assisted data. The descriptive analysis reveals that the form of Igbo diminutives can be categorised into synthetic, analytic, and category incorporated. The results show that the suffix -tụ́ is the most productive diminutive marker in Igbo and is used when referring to the contact between entities, temporal shortness (short duration), spatial smallness, small featural differentiation, and politeness. I argue that tone generally does not govern Igbo diminutive constructions. The study contributes to the literature by identifying a third type of diminutives ‘category incorporated’, which refers to verbal constructions that do not prototypically have explicit diminutive forms or markers but have diminutive meanings. This research provides a distinct perspective on the important role of verbs in the formation of diminutives in the Igbo language.

The Zaghawa language, one of the Saharan languages spoken in western Sudan, specifically the Darfur region, and east-central Chad, is the subject of this descriptive study with special focus on Arabic borrowings. The paper investigates Sudanese Standard Arabic and Baggara Arabic borrowings that have entered Zaghawa through contact with speakers of Arabic. This will be accomplished by showcasing and analyzing the phonological and morphological characteristics of the recipient language, as well as by demonstrating how the Arabic words that were borrowed have been adapted into Zaghawa. The semantic fields of the lexical borrowings are also discussed. Zaghawa exists in a community which is greatly influenced by Islam and the Arabic language. The major dialects of Zaghawa are Wegi, Kube, and Tuba and there are two minor dialects, Dirong and Guruf. Wegi is considered one of the major dialects of Zaghawa wholly spoken in Sudan. The data for this contribution has been collected from speakers of the Wegi dialect living in Khartoum.

This article constitutes a pioneering comparative study of the use of epistemic possibility adverbs (EPAs) – i.e., sentence or clausal adverbs expressing neutral epistemic support (reminiscent of English ‘perhaps’) – in the Bantu languages of East Africa. In a sample of a total of 77 languages, the semantic and syntactic inter- and intra-clausal distribution of EPAs and the way they interact with other modal markers is investigated. Next, the semasiological background of the East African Bantu EPAs and the range of additional functions they may serve to co-express is explored. Based on the semantic characteristics of the EPAs, their etymons and the linguistic categories they additionally convey, it is proposed that the common conceptualization underlying these patterns of polysemy is the notion of scalarity, and more precisely that of an in-between position between a positive and a negative pole, thus conveying a neutral, indeterminate or interchangeable stance. Through these endeavors, this study offers the first thorough, comparative-based investigation of the development and distribution of epistemic adverbs in Bantu languages, broadening our understanding of expressions of modality and the use of adverbs more generally, both within Bantu languages and beyond.

This paper discusses the different syntactic status of the prenominal marker a in three languages spoken in Burkina Faso and neighbouring countries (Dagara, Mooré and Koromfe) and its respective relation to the determiner system. We argue that the marker is a head-initial determiner in Dagara, a proprial article in Mooré and a nominal expletive in Koromfe and tentatively suggest a possible common pronominal origin. The paper also addresses further points of variation in the higher nominal structure of the three languages concerning DP directionality and the co-occurrence of determiners, demonstratives and possessors, providing a basis for future wider investigations across the Mabia/Gur family.

Bilin (ISO 639-3:byn), a Central Cushitic (Agaw) language of Eritrea, exhibits complex patterns of derivational and inflectional verbal morphology. In this article, three verb forms of Bilin, their semantics, morphosyntax, and history, are analysed in detail on grounds of both previous scholarly efforts, especially Reinisch (1881, Die Bilīn-Sprache in Nordost-Afrika . Wien: Carl Gerold’s Sohn), Palmer (1957. The verb in Bilin. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 19(1). 131–159), and Appleyard (2007. Bilin morphology. In Alan S. Kaye (ed.), Morphologies of Asia and Africa , 481–504. Penn State University Press), as well as data elicited through fieldwork. These three forms are the imperfective marker -sɨk , the habitualis suffix -tuk , and the converb -ɛk . It is shown that the Bilin verb paradigm is even richer than assumed, expressing not only tense, aspect, mood, person, and number, but possibly additional grammatical notions such as volitionality.