Much of this literature has concentrated on chosing between one of two analyses: either the OM is a pure agreement marker, analogous to subject markers/agreement in Bantu and other languages, or it is a cliticized pronoun that counts as the true object of the verb even though it appears on the verb on the surface. On the latter analysis, the overt NP in (1c) is not the true grammatical object o...

Pygmy populations are among the few hunter-gatherers currently living in sub-Saharan Africa and are mainly represented by two groups, Eastern and Western, according to their current geographical distribution. They are scattered across the Central African belt and surrounded by Bantu-speaking farmers, with whom they have complex social and economic interactions. To investigate the demographic hi...

The current enormous amount of data on the Semantic Web and its increasing uptake raises the question of how this data can be accessed in several languages. OWL provides limited support for multilingualism through the use of an annotation property. However, it is known that more expressive models are required for linguistically demanding applications. Among the possible solutions, Lexicon Model...

We describe the Lwazi corpus for automatic speech recognition (ASR), a new telephone speech corpus which includes data from nine Southern Bantu languages. Because of practical constraints, the amount of speech per language is relatively small compared to major corpora in world languages, and we report on our investigation of the stability of the ASR models derived from the corpus. We also repor...

The paper describes problems in disambiguating the morphological analysis of Bantu languages by using Swahili as a test language. The main factors of ambiguity in this language group can be traced to the noun class structure on one hand and to the bi-directional word-formation on the other. In analyzing word-forms, the system applied utilizes SWATWOL, a morphological parsing program based on tw...

We describe the Lwazi corpus for automatic speech recognition (ASR), a new telephone speech corpus which includes data from nine Southern Bantu languages. Because of practical constraints, the amount of speech per language is relatively small compared to major corpora in world languages, and we report on our investigation of the stability of the ASR models derived from the corpus. We also repor...

An important problem of comparative Niger-Congo morphology is understanding the processes that relate word structures in languages of the isolating “Kwa” type to those of the agglutinating “Bantu” type. A salient sub-problem of this larger morphological puzzle is charting the connection between the noun class systems of the Kwa-type languages which, at one extreme, can lack such classes entirel...

For decades the assumption in traditional phonology has been that URs had the two functions of (i) capturing generalizations (“what’s in the language”) and (ii) capturing the speaker’s knowledge (“what’s in the head”). Bantu languages have been among those providing evidence of robust morphophonemic alternations of the sort captured by URs in generative phonology. In this paper I take a new loo...