A Grammar of Fongbe

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Walter de Gruyter, 2002 - 582 Seiten

This book is a reference grammar of Fongbe, a language which is part of the Gbe dialect cluster. It is spoken mainly in the former kingdom of Dahomey, which today comprises the southern areas of Benin and Togo. This book has three objectives: First, its main purpose is to provide a thorough description of the grammar of Fongbe. Second, this book provides language-specific syntactic tests which were developed in the course of this research. Finally, we provide the reader with the most exhaustive list possible of references on Fongbe, and on the Gbe languages in general. This book thus attempts to represent a "state of the art" of the language itself, and of the analyses proposed to account for its particular constructions. This book is of particular interest to Africanists, scholars interested in comparative linguistics or in the reconstruction of language families, and creolists who work on the languages spoken in the Caribbean area.

 

Ausgewählte Seiten

Inhalt

Overview of the phonology
15
Functional categories involved in the nominal structure
37
Pronominal forms
61
Tense mood and aspect
85
Functional categories involved in the structure of the clause
113
Clause structures
143
Morphology
183
Compounds
221
Modifiers
347
Serial verbs
399
The double object construction
445
The definite determiner in simple clauses
481
The socalled verbdoubling phenomena
503
Swadesh list
533
Text
539
A sample of idiomatic verbal expressions
547

Verbs
235
to remain and to be missing
278
Prepositions and postpositions
299
Indexe of authors
573
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Seite 2 - Gen and Aja, Aja and Fon, etc.; but the degree of mutual intelligibility is related to 'geographical' distance, eg although there is some mutual intelligibility between Ewe and Aja, it is less than between Ewe and Gen, and there seems to be none between Ewe and Fon which are the extreme ends of the dialect cluster.
Seite 399 - A serial verb construction is a succession of verbs and their complements (if any) with one subject and one tense value that are not separated by any overt marker of coordination or subordination.
Seite 94 - As the general definition of aspect, we may take the formulation that 'aspects are different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation
Seite 88 - factative1 to describe an aspect which "expresses the most obvious fact about the verb in question, which in the case of active verbs is that the action was observed or took place, but for stative verbs is that the situation obtains at present
Seite 454 - Y is in the domain of X iff X c-commands Y and X precedes Y.

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