Restructured Niger-Congo gender systems as another type of concurrent nominal classification

An Evaluation of Niger-Congo Classification

Gender and classifiers in concurrent systems: Refining the typology of nominal classification

Some languages have both gender and classifiers, contrary to what was once believed possible. We use these interesting languages as a unique window onto nominal classification. They provide the impetus for a new typology, based on the degree of orthogonality of the semantic systems and the degree of difference of the forms realizing them. This nine-way typology integrates traditional gender, tr...

Another Look At Nominal Compounds

We present a progress report on our research on nominal compounds (NC's). Recent approaches to this probiem in linguistics and natural ianguage processing (NLP) are reviewed and criticized. We argue that the notion of "roie nominal", which is at the interface of linguistic and extraiinguistic knowledge, is crucial for characterizing NC'e as weII as other Iinguistic phenomena. We examine a numbe...

Morphotonology for TTS in Niger-Congo languages

It is well–known that many East Asian languages have lexical (i.e. phonemic) prosody, and languages such as Mandarin are very well described. African languages are also frequently mentioned in the literature as tone languages, and phonetic interface patterns such as downstep are well–documented. It is less well– known that the functionality of tone patterning in African tone languages is fundam...

TheMacro-Sudan Belt and Niger-Congo Reconstruction

Basing himself largely on areal and typological arguments, Güldemann (2010) claims that neither Proto-Niger-Congo nor Proto-Bantu had more than a “moderate” system of derivational verb suffixes (“extensions”), and that both proto languages lacked inflectional verb prefixes. Although drawing largely on the same materials as Hyman (2004, 2007a,b), he arrives at the opposite conclusion that Niger-...