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- Plural verbs occur throughout most of Africa and have certainly been
recorded in Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic and Nilo-Saharan language phyla
- Nonetheless, their distribution is very patchy which may be related to
broadly to the incidence of verb morphology; where verbs have
derivational morphology, plural verbs can occur.
- Branches of phyla which have lost morphology, such as West Benue-Congo,
can only develop plural verbs through suppletion, which does occur, but
is very rare
- This talk will cover languages where verbal plurals have been
lexicalised; languages with productive extensions marking frequentative
or iterative, such as Bantu are not considered
- As a consequence most attention is give to morphology but examples of
syntax are found in the source papers
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- Central Nigeria is a sort of ‘heartland’ for systems of
plural verbs; all languages have them and they are very different from
one language to another
- This is in part because a number of language families with residual
systems have come into intensive contact and influenced and reinforced
each other’s systems Central Nigeria is a region where
morphologically marked plural verbs are extremely common, although the
linguistic literature yields few descriptions. Strikingly, plural verbs
strategies cross boundaries of both language families and phyla. The
uses of plural verbs can be categorised as follows;
- 1. Describing an action repeated many times (iterative)
- 2. Describing an action with multiple subjects (distributive)
- 3. Describing an action with multiple objects (distributive)
- 4. Describing an action conducted over a long time (durative)
(sometimes merging with imperfective)
- 5. Describing the intensity of an action
- Any combination of these
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- The literature is full of different terms to describe these verbs and
sophisticated distinctions between plural and pluractional etc.
- At least for many languages dealt with here, this is to make the
impoverished descriptive literature carry more weight than it can bear
- Unless you actually test each verb individually with a range of
informants it is simply not
possible to assert the range of application of individual verbs
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- The languages of Central Nigeria fall into two major phyla, Afroasiatic
and Niger-Congo
- Afroasiatic is represented by West Chadic languages, of which the most
well-known is Hausa, and the Benue-Congo languages, most
characteristically Plateau and East Kainji
- Further east are the Adamawa languages which have also show verbal
plurality and to the south, Nupoid, for which plurality is reported for
Gbari but not elsewhere in the family
- We know that these families have undergone extensive interaction in the
past and although they are likely to have inherited the concept of
plurality from earlier stages of the phylum, there is no doubt that the
synchronic forms are the result of direct and indirect borrowing
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- The materials presented here are extracted from a series of datasets of
varying completeness on languages of Central Nigeria all of which are
available for download from my website They present data samples from a
range of languages, focusing of particular aspects of morphology
- A failure to realise the significance of plural verbs often means that
verbal plurality is not recognised in grammatical descriptions and not
clearly listed in dictionary-type materials
- Unlike nouns, verb pairings (or more) are not quickly available to
informants. Therefore we cannot be sure that we have complete lists for
any given language
- Suppletion is fairly common, and therefore whether a quite different
root is the ‘plural’ of a singular can be disputed. This
probably relates to semantic ramification common with some types of
verbs such as ‘cut’ or ‘pour’.
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- Pluractional forms are threatened in many languages; i.e. younger
informants do not know them or only know them passively
- The reasons are disputed; is it part of general trend towards
simplification of morphology among increasingly urbanised youth?
- Or is it that ‘you don’t speak the language properly until
you are xx years old’?
- Perversely, semantic shifts and suppletive plurals are probably
conserved better than those with predictable meanings (clearly you can
speak and be understood without using them)
- But it seems likely much of the data recorded here will not be
recoverable in a couple of decades although the languages will still be
spoken
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- Mwaghavul is a West Chadic language formerly known as Sura
- Its closest relatives are Ngas, Goemai etc.
- It is spoken in Plateau State, Nigeria. The major towns are Mangu and
Panyam
- There are probably ca. 200,000 speakers
- Part of its system of verbal plurality is inherited from Afroasiatic;
the ‘internal –a- plural’ which occurs in both nouns
and verbs and is attested in various branches of AA
- The second element is
plurality
- The third is borrowing
(apparently of morphemes) from neighbouring Benue-Congo languages
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- εBoze is an East Kainji language spoken some 10 km northwest of
Jos. There are probably 10,000 speakers some of limited competence
- East Kainji languages are some of the most poorly known languages in
Nigeria. There are probably ca. 20, although they are all quite closely
related (we think)
- The West Kainji languages
have complex plural verb morphology, but the present evidence is that
East Kainji affixes are reduced
- Moreover, there is less
evidence for borrowing from neighbouring languages than the other groups
discussed here.
- This may be consequence of
poorer coverage
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- εBoze verbs plural
extensions typically refer to;
- Plural subjects
- Plural objects
- Iteratives
- Ca. 50% of εBoze verbs appear to have these extensions, although
the existence of an extension appears to be unpredictable. They are not
well-known and it often takes time to recall them during elicitation
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- Broadly speaking, in transitive verbs the plural extension refers to
multiple objects and with intransitives to plural subjects
- The use of iteratives is not predictable
- Singular/plural stems are always cognate, there are no suppletive
plurals presently recorded, although these occur in Plateau languages
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- All of these appear to derive from an original affix, either ZYV- or -SV
where ZY is a palatal affricate and S is an unspecified fricative and
the V is either –a/ə or copies the stem.
- The suffix -SV can either follow the stem, or replace the final
–CV syllable.
- The most unpredictable element is the vowel of the affix unless the stem
vowel is -a-
- These pluralising elements occur in other areas of the lexicon, notably
ideophones
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- Eastern Berom is a Plateau language spoken North of Jos in central
Nigeria
- There may be up to a
million speakers, but Berom is quite dialectally diverse and not all
the forms discussed here occur in other dialects
- Berom has a very large number of plural verbs with many different
subtypes and categories
- The surface pairings that occur today are to be explained by the
addition, erosion and re-affixing of fossil verbal extensions which
have been semantically bleached so that they now only indicate
plurality.
- No case exists synchronically of verbs where the productive application
of more than one affix is permitted.
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- Although Niger-Congo nouns usually show two-way oppositions for number
(alternations of CV affixes) there are persistent traces of three term
systems as found widely in Nilo-Saharan
- Thus;
- A beer beer beers
- Ear of grain cereal head field of cereal plants
- The central term is the unmarked form
- This idea seems to be somehow similar to verbs, both in Berom and in
Vagla (a Gur language)
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- The Fyem language appears to have an incipient system of plural verbs
being regularised. There are morphologically marked distinctions
between number of subjects and event numbers
- The unmarked form appears to a single subject performing a single
action.
- Some verbs distinguish;
- Plural subjects
- Single subject and multiple actions
- Plural subjects and plural actions
- Data testing remains woefully incomplete
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- Central Nigeria is an area of great diversity and remains largely
undescribed but which undoubtedly results from interaction og languages
though marriage systems and extensive bilingualism
- There do appear to be any obvious semantic drivers motivating the
choice of verbs to have/retain plural morphology
- Evidence for direct lexical borrowing is quite limited, despite the
Berom-Izere example. In most cases it is more the idea of plurality and
sometimes the morphemes
- Generalisations about what plural verbs ‘do’ are doomed to
failure due to the multiplex and diverse systems
- This research also has practical consequences' for written materials.
Do you represent conservative speech given the predominant audience for
literacy are the younger generation?
- Much analysed and raw data can be downloaded from my website…
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- To Kay Williamson Educational Foundation for supporting the fieldwork
and my presence here
- To the various communities and individuals who have helped compile the
relevant datasets
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Notes
