In many languages the agreement relation between an argument and a verb is suppressed or altered when the argument is extracted. These so-called anti-agreement effects (AAEs) have been discussed for Berber, Breton, Irish, Turkish, Italian dialects, and other languages as well (see Ouhalla 1993, among others). Recently, Scheider-Zioga (2000, 2002, 2007) and Cheng (2006) have discussed AAE in Ban...

This article describes the design of an electronic knowledge base, namely a morpho-syntactic database structured as an ontology of linguistic categories, containing linguistic units of two related languages of the South African Bantu group: Northern Sotho and Zulu. These languages differ significantly in their surface orthographies, but are very similar on the lexical and sub-lexical levels. It...

There are many domain-specific and language-specific NLG systems, which are possibly adaptable across related domains and languages. The languages in the Bantu language family have their own set of features distinct from other major groups, which therefore severely limits the options to bootstrap an NLG system from existing ones. We present here our first proof-of-concept application for knowle...

Between 1500 and 1850, more than 12 million enslaved Africans were transported to the New World. The vast majority were shipped from West and West-Central Africa, but their precise origins are largely unknown. We used genome-wide ancient DNA analyses to investigate the genetic origins of three enslaved Africans whose remains were recovered on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. We trace their...

this paper focused on the way names of body parts are artistically used to convey meanings and messages in kifipa, a bantu language spoken in tanzania. since the body parts metaphors are used by people to portray meanings in their daily conversations (kovecses, 2004; vierke, 2012), the paper investigated such linguistic richness in the language. methodologically, the study identified names of b...

The objective of this article is to create awareness amongst speech-language pathologists and audiologists in South Africa regarding the difference between the sound systems of Germanic languages and the sound systems of South African Bantu languages. A brief overview of the sound systems of two Bantu languages, namely isiZulu and Setswana, is provided. These two languages are representative of...