A grammar of Fwe: A Bantu language of Zambia and Namibia

557 Pages·2018·12.129 MB·English

by  Hilde Gunnink

Administratief Prof. Dr. Michael Meeuwis
verantwoordelijk vakgroep Talen en Culturen
promotor:
Promotor: Prof. Dr. Koen Bostoen
vakgroep Talen en Culturen
UGENT
A grammar of Fwe
A Bantu language of Zambia and Namibia

Hilde Gunnink
9-3-2018
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Acknowledgements
Without diminishing the emotional trials and suffering that some PhD students go
through, writing this dissertation has been an incredibly fun experience. Working on
a single topic, as rich as an entire language, for more than five years, has been a great
joy, and I want to express my gratitude to everyone who has helped to make this pos-
sible.
I am grateful to my supervisors, prof. Michael Meeuwis and prof. Koen Bostoen,
for having faith in me, helping me with my work, providing assistance when I need-
ed it and leaving me be when I needed that; a special word of thanks to Koen for
providing me with the topic of Fwe, which I never would have thought of myself,
but which I know now is by far the best language in Africa, if not the world. I also
thank my colleagues from the BantUGent research group (and beyond) for their
fruitful discussions of all things Bantu, or non-Bantu. I especially thank Sebastian
Dom and Dr. Thera Crane, who read parts of my thesis and shared their valuable
feedback. I also want to thank Jan Gunnink, geomodelling specialist at the Geological
Survey of the Netherlands at TNO (and my father), for creating the maps used in this
thesis. My thanks also go to Maaike Goethals, not only for her secreterial support, but
also for our many shared lunches / impromptu West-Flemish elicitation sessions.
I want to thank Ghent University, who gave me the luxurious position of working
on my dissertation for six years, and provided me with what I needed to perform this
work. I also want to thank Ghent University’s Special Research Fund and the Flemish
Research Organization for generously funding my four field trips.
In Zambia and Namibia, I want to thank everyone who contributed to my field-
work. In Namibia, my thanks go to the University of Namibia and the Department of
Language and Literature Studies for providing me with the invitations and research
affiliations I needed to be allowed to do fieldwork. In Zambia, I thank the Livingstone
Museum for helping me with my research affiliation in 2015, and especially Dr. Terry
Nyambe for helping me get set up in Sesheke.
My dear informants, how can I thank you enough? Let me not even try to attempt
it and just list your names as a sign of gratitude and recognition for all your hard
work and patience; Mr. Bonard Simasiku, Mr. Ephraim Mafaya Mbango, Mr. Sish-
washwa Muketwa Nector, Mr. Mutoiwa Namangolwa; Mr. Felix, Mrs Rebecca
Maunda, Ms Betty Muyendekwa, induna Jared; Ms. Grace Muyendekwa; Mr. Event
Mubika Linyando, and my star informant, and linguist in a previous life, Mr. Aldrin
Mahulilo Haluzibi. Twalitumeli, bamuruti. I also thank all the Fwe speakers who con-
tributed to my research by sharing stories, proverbs, riddles, and maroko, their
knowledge on plant and tree names, and their pronunciation of click words. I also
want to thank Orbet Siseho Pilaelo, Hennie Schoonwinkel (buy many donkies!), Lien-
eke de Visser, and the ladies of the Katima Mulilo Town Council Guest House for all
their practical support.
It is well known that writing a PhD thesis is not merely an academic effort. I am
grateful for all the non-academic support I received from my friends and family. A
special thank you to my lovely parents, who supported my training as an Africanist
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linguist both morally and finanically, and who enthousiastically followed me around
on my field trips, to the point that they started to do fieldwork themselves. Finally, I
thank my dear boyfriend Benjamin Suchard, for his long-distance moral support dur-
ing my field trips, for his fresh non-Bantuist perspective on my data that helped
strengthen the analysis, and for his sudden interest in typography that helped to de-
velop the layout used in this thesis.
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List of glosses
adverb negative
augment neuter
applicative nominalizer
causative nominal prefix
comitative near past
connective object marker
conditional passive
copulative personal pronoun
demonstrative perfective
diminutive pluractional
distal possessive
emphatic pronominal prefix
(demonstratives) progressive
extensive persistive
final vowel past
habitual reciprocal
impositive reflexive
inceptive relative
infinitive remoteness
instrumental remote future
intransitive separative
imperfective subjunctive
locative subject marker
locative stative
pluractional tentive
near future transitive
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ................................................................................................v
List of glosses ........................................................................................................ vii
1 Introduction ...................................................................................................... 1
1.1 Classification .............................................................................................. 1
1.2 Sociolinguistic profile ............................................................................... 1
1.3 Language vitality .......................................................................................4
1.4 Regional variation ..................................................................................... 5
1.5 Earlier research ..........................................................................................6
1.6 Current research and motivation .............................................................6
1.7 Data collection and transcription ............................................................. 8
2 Segmental phonology ..................................................................................... 11
2.1 Introduction .............................................................................................. 11
2.2 Consonants ............................................................................................... 11
2.2.1 Plosives .................................................................................................. 12
2.2.2 Fricatives ............................................................................................... 16
2.2.3 Affricates .............................................................................................. 20
2.2.4 Nasals .................................................................................................... 20
2.2.5 Tap......................................................................................................... 21
2.2.6 Glides .................................................................................................... 22
2.2.7 Prenasalized obstruents ....................................................................... 24
2.2.8 Clicks ..................................................................................................... 27
2.3 Vowels ...................................................................................................... 32
2.3.1 Phonemic vowels ................................................................................. 33
2.3.2 Phonemic vowel length ....................................................................... 33
2.3.3 Phonetic vowel lengthening ............................................................... 36
2.3.4 Prosodic vowel lengthening ................................................................ 39
2.4 Syllable structure ..................................................................................... 41
2.4.1 Syllable types ......................................................................................... 41
2.4.2 Co-occurrence restrictions ................................................................. 44
3 Morphophonology ......................................................................................... 51
3.1 Prenasalization ......................................................................................... 51
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3.2 Vowel hiatus resolution .......................................................................... 55
3.2.1 Maintenance of both vowels ............................................................... 55
3.2.2 Deletion of the first vowel ................................................................... 57
3.2.3 Glide formation .................................................................................... 58
3.2.4 Vowel coalescence ................................................................................ 61
3.2.5 Consonant epenthesis .......................................................................... 62
3.3 Vowel harmony ...................................................................................... 64
3.3.1 Vowel harmony .................................................................................... 65
3.3.2 Back vowel harmony ........................................................................... 67
3.3.3 Vowel harmony with monosyllabic verb roots ................................. 67
3.4 Nasal harmony......................................................................................... 68
4 Tone ................................................................................................................ 71
4.1 Tonal processes ........................................................................................ 72
4.1.1 Meeussen’s Rule .................................................................................... 73
4.1.2 Downstep .............................................................................................. 76
4.1.3 Bimoraic doubling ............................................................................... 79
4.1.4 H retraction .......................................................................................... 79
4.1.5 H > F ..................................................................................................... 81
4.1.6 High tone spread .................................................................................. 83
4.1.7 The order of tonal processes ................................................................ 86
4.2 Tonal patterns on nouns ......................................................................... 86
4.2.1 Disyllabic nouns ................................................................................... 86
4.2.2 Monosyllabic nouns ............................................................................. 88
4.2.3 Polysyllabic noun stems ....................................................................... 91
4.2.4 Noun stems with a floating high tone ................................................ 93
4.3 Tonal patterns on infinitive verbs .......................................................... 95
4.3.1 Disyllabic verbs ..................................................................................... 95
4.3.2 Monosyllabic verbs .............................................................................. 96
4.3.3 Polysyllabic verb stems ......................................................................... 97
4.3.4 Verb stems with a floating high tone ................................................. 97
5 Noun classes ...................................................................................................101
5.1 Nominal prefixes ....................................................................................101
5.2 The augment ......................................................................................... 107
5.3 Singular and plural pairings ................................................................... 112
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5.4 The semantics of noun classes ............................................................... 116
5.5 The locative noun classes ...................................................................... 126
5.6 Noun class assignment of loanwords ................................................... 132
6 Nominal derivation .......................................................................................137
6.1 Verb to noun derivation ........................................................................137
6.1.1 Agentive -i ...........................................................................................137
6.1.2 Instrumental -o .................................................................................... 138
6.1.3 General nominalizer -ntu .................................................................. 140
6.1.4 Unproductive -u, -e and -a ............................................................... 142
6.2 Noun to noun derivation ..................................................................... 144
6.2.1 Diminutive .......................................................................................... 144
6.2.2 Associative ........................................................................................... 147
6.3 Nominal compounds ............................................................................ 149
6.4 Noun reduplication ................................................................................ 151
7 The noun phrase ........................................................................................... 153
7.1 Adjectives ................................................................................................ 153
7.2 Demonstratives ....................................................................................... 158
7.2.1 The form of demonstratives ............................................................... 158
7.2.2 Functions of the demonstratives........................................................ 163
7.3 Connectives ........................................................................................... 167
7.3.1 The form of the connective clitic ..................................................... 168
7.3.2 The functions of the connective ....................................................... 174
7.4 Quantifiers .............................................................................................. 175
7.5 Possessives .............................................................................................. 177
7.6 Personal pronouns ................................................................................. 180
7.7 Comitatives ............................................................................................ 182
7.7.1 Form of the comitative ...................................................................... 182
7.7.2 Functions of the comitative ............................................................... 186
7.8 Copulatives ............................................................................................. 191
7.9 Appositives ............................................................................................. 197
8 Verbal derivation .......................................................................................... 199
8.1 Introduction to verbal morphology ..................................................... 199
8.2 Introduction to verbal derivation ........................................................ 202
8.3 Passive ................................................................................................... 204
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