Volume 67, Issue 1 - Berber in typological perspective

Tashlhiyt is famous for its particularly marked syllable structure. Unlike the majority of world languages, including some related Berber varieties, Tashlhiyt allows not only vowels but all consonants – including voiceless stops /t/, /k/ or /q/ – to be nuclei of a syllable (e.g., [tkmi] `she smoked' is analyzed as bisyllabic where the sequence [tk] stands for a syllable of its own with /k/ as the nucleus). A fundamental aspect of this analysis concerns constraints on the syllable onset constituent: complex onsets are prohibited. A consequence of this is that prevocalic consonant clusters are systematically parsed as heterosyllabic, regardless of the sonority profile of the consonants and the position of the cluster within a word or a phrase. This study provides phonetic and metalinguistic data to test this phonological account on experimental grounds. The analysis of these data provides clear evidence that Tashlhiyt disallows complex syllable onsets.

Berber languages have a two-term gender opposition. Most nouns are allowed to appear in both genders, expressing meaning differences such as natural gender and size. Nouns have a neutral gender value, which is lexically determined, and a derivation which is marked by the opposite gender. In the case of size differences, this leads to a ternary opposition (diminutive – neutral – augmentative), expressed by only two genders. The grammatical constraint on the number of values is sometimes circumvened by using different allomorphs of gender morphemes. With a number of sub-classes of nouns a ternary opposition is made possible by a change in morphological sub-class.

Siwi, a Berber language of Egypt, shows gender/number agreement of medial demonstratives with the addressee. Such phenomena are crosslinguistically very rarely reported, and are not discussed in major surveys of the typology of demonstratives (Diessel 1999; Imai 2003). However, within person-oriented demonstrative systems, such marking amounts to an iconic representation of addressee anchoring. The pragmatics of Siwi demonstratives thus cast light on the nature of the mapping from person to place that such systems reflect (Greenberg 1985). Comparative eastern Berber data suggests that demonstrative addressee agreement may be more widespread than the literature reflects.

Several Berber languages are characterized by a binary system of inflectional marking on the noun called ``states''. This study is a first step towards a complete analysis of the absolute vs. annexed state distinction in Berber languages. It provides a framework for a typological comparison of the systems of state-marking in Berber, gives an overview of their features in four Berber languages (Western Kabyle, Shawiya (Aït Frah), Wargli (Teggargrent) and Tahaggart (Hoggar Tuareg), and proposes typological generalizations to be tested on other Berber languages.

The world's languages generally distinguish between nouns and verbs. However, many do not have a specific class of adjectives with its own significantly different grammatical properties to set it apart from nouns and verbs. This is true of Berber which, in this respect, differs from Arabic. That being said, if one looks at the details, there is wide variety across Berber languages. Most have both ``verbal'' adjectives and ``nominal'' adjectives, with more or less marked secondary properties. Some have a small adjective class for describing certain core properties. Historically, these could reflect an earlier phase of Berber.

A relative clause is subordinate to a nominal element (noun or pronoun) called ``antecedent'', in order to define or complete its meaning. Therefore any language making use of relative clauses must: 1) make clear that the relative clause is indeed subordinate; 2) show which type of relation exists between the relative clause and the antecedent, i.e. what would be the grammatical function of the antecedent, should the clause be independent and include it. The different ways of answering that double constraint provide criteria for a typological classification of relative clauses. The article describes the choices made by a few Berber languages.

This article addresses the phenomenon of topicalization from a typological perspective, both at the level of the Berber phylum and at the crosslinguistic level. It aims at providing Berber's principal linguistic properties and mechanisms of topicalization in comparison with cross-linguistic accounts so as to better understand the connection between syntax and information structure, which in Berber is subject to variation and to a complex interplay with prosody.

The best-known information structures, focus and topic have already been described for almost all Berber languages. However, intonation in these structures is seldom described in spite of its essential part. In this paper, my aim is to describe the focalization process, focusing on intonation, in Tamasheq, as compared with Tetserret; indeed, the two languages, even if they share some similarities because of they are in constant contact and belong to the same phylum, follow different intonative rules in most occurrences. We will see that, in those two languages, the focalization process is rich, even from a typological point of view, and that, here again, intonation is different from one language to another.

The discovery of a long text in medieval Berber provides the opportunity to gain a deeper insight into the typological features of an old variety of Berber. Some of these are presented and briefly discussed here. Besides a number of features typical of the Eastern Berber varieties, many archaic features emerge, and this may contribute to advancing our understanding of the diachronic evolution of the Berber languages.