Lecture (LEC)

• Above class meets with LING-L480
• Above class open to graduate students only

Introduction to the linguistic study of African languages, questions about language distribution and language use, genetic and typological classification, structural aspects of African languages as well as selected sociolinguistic and pragmatics aspects of African languages. Important course topics to be discussed include: (a) Genetic Classification of African Languages into Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, Afro-Asiatic and Khoisan; Typological Classification of African Languages into syllable and word structure types, vowel and consonant types and systems, tone-intonation types, etc.; (c) Phonological Structure (sound system, vowel harmony, long vs. short vowels, consonant mutation, coordinate co-articulation and secondary co-articulation, stress, tone and intonation); (d) Morphological Structure ¿ word structure, noun classes and concordial agreement, verbal extensions, plural formation, reduplication, compounding, and negation; (e) Syntactic Structure ¿ word order parameters, noun, verb, adjectival and adverb phrases, interjections and ideophones as well as different sentence types (simple, compound and complex); (d) Aspects of Sociolinguistics ¿ language contact, pidgins and creoles, language Policy; and (e) Aspects of Pragmatics such as the concepts of face and politeness, speech act theory and specific speech acts (apologizing, requesting and complimenting), and African onomastics (especially anthroponymy and toponymy).