1367260110.5528Understanding Syntax

30Understanding syntax(8) Kmlu i-mn-la-hai pukah (Southwest Tanna)we.two.exc 1pl-past-dual-stab pigRecall from Section 1.2.2.2 that the dot ‘.’ in a gloss indicates that the variouspieces of grammatical information can’t be separated from each other: the wholeform kmlu in (7) and (8) therefore has the meaning (glossed as) ‘we.two.exc’.5. The following data are all from Niger-Congo languages, a massive family ofAfrican languages covering almost a quarter of the total languages in the world.Task: Examine each sentence and note as many grammatical differences in theseexamples as you can between English and each of the various source languages.Look for differences in both the syntax and the morphosyntax, and describethese differences carefully, using the correct terminology where you can. The dataare taken from Watters (2000) and Payne (1985a).(1) è wúru tèe à bóa (Mende)he cut stick with knife‘He cut the stick with a knife.’(2) ba-tub-aka (Lobala)3pl-sing-past‘They sang.’(3) Halima a-na-pika ugali (Swahili)Halima 3sg-pres-cook porridge‘Halima is cooking porridge.’(4) a. ɔ́ tẽ kɔ́ (Kru)he buy rice‘He bought rice.’b. ɔ́ sé kɔ́ tẽhe neg buy rice‘He didn’t buy rice.’6. These data are from a Melanesian language called Tinrin, spoken in part of theislands of New Caledonia, in the southwest Pacific Ocean (Osumi 1995).Task: (i) Figure out the function of the grammatical marker nrâ shown in eachexample in (1) through (6) in bold type, and not glossed; (ii) decide why thismarker does not occur in (7), (8) and (9).Hints∑ Don’t worry about the fact that Tinrin has another morpheme with the formnrâ, which occurs in (2), (4), (5), (6) and (9). This has a different meaningaltogether: it’s a third person singular pronoun, and has no relevance to youranswer.