News

I am inordinately proud to announce that I have a new paper out in the journal Semantic Fieldwork Methods. The paper is called “The witness and the alibi: A method for eliciting temporal contrasts in reported speech” and it describes a simple but fun method I developed for looking at how temporally “graded” tense and aspect markers are used in reported speech in isiNdebele. Here is the abstract:

I propose a simple, two-stage storytelling process used for investigating multiple tense contrasts in reported speech and illustrate a basic example of its use from a pilot study in isiNdebele. IsiNdebele is a Nguni Bantu language of South Africa with two degrees of past tense marking and three future forms that are less clearly differentiated for temporal distance. The method involves translating a conversation with references to several past and future events and then role-playing a courtroom testimony in which the conversation is reported. I also describe a simple complementary picture-card–based method.

Again, it’s hard to overstate how excited I am to be published in this journal on my favourite topic.

I’m also happy to announce a chapter that came out slightly less recently in the OUP volume Beyond aspectual semantics: Explorations in the pragmatic and cognitive realms of aspect, edited by Astrid De Wit, Frank Brisard, Carol Madden-Lombardi, Michael Meeuwis, and Adeline Patard. This volume was published in March, but I only recently got my hands on it, first because I was doing fieldwork in South Africa, and then because I failed to understand the new department mail system. Anyway, I have a chapter with Hilde Gunnink, Ponsiano Kanijo, and Tim Roth called “Aspect and evidentiality in four Bantu languages“. The link goes to a slightly older “authors'” version, but I recommend the whole volume, and I hope your library will purchase it! The abstract:

Fully grammaticalized, obligatory evidentiality systems are thought to be rare in the languages of Africa, and in Bantu languages in particular. However, ongoing semantic research in Bantu languages continues to uncover systems that are primarily evidential in their semantics, as well as other grammatical categories that can be exploited secondarily to express evidential distinctions. In this chapter, we discuss Fwe, Nyamwezi, Nzadi, and Ikoma, four geographically and typologically diverse Bantu languages in which distinct grams with overlapping tense–aspect readings exhibit salient distinctions in their evidential force. The evidentiality distinctions seen in these languages add further support for the robust cross-linguistic link between resultatives and indirect evidentials. Links between progressive aspect and ‘authoritive’ (first-hand sensory or trusted second-hand) evidentials are also suggested.

This is the paper that inspired my further work on “Looking for evidentiality (and mirativity) in Bantu“.

 

This month we’ve had the pleasure of hosting Onelisa Slater from Rhodes University in South Africa. We visited Gothenburg to attend the start-up workshop of Rasmus Bernander’s project “Modality in Swahili – Variation, Change and Transfer” (with co-investigators Maud Devos and Gilles-Maurice de Schryver), for which I serve on the advisory board, AND to celebrate the launch of the Corpus of Spoken isiXhosa, part of a project headed by Eva-Marie Bloom Ström, in which Onelisa also works. I am so excited about this fantastic new resource!!

In addition to working together on the mentally stimulating and exhausting topic of modal negation – more to come on that soon, hopefully! – Onelisa and I, together with Lotta Aunio, co-taught a beginner’s isiXhosa course using the “strong” communicative method of language teaching and learning. It was loads of fun, and the student learning was impressive for a short course! We’d do it again in a heartbeat.

We’re also very pleased to be able to mention that our latest paper has been published in Studies in Language! It’s called “What can be said? Variation among expressions of modal possibility in a South African language cluster” and was co-authored by me and Onelisa along with Remah Lubambo, M Petrus Mabena, Cordelia Nkwinika, and Muhle Sibisi. Here is the abstract:

Following the 2021 online workshop on mirativity and evidentiality in Bantu, convenors Hannah Gibson and Jenneke van der Wal have put together a beautiful special issue of Studies in African Linguistics on the same topic. My contribution has the descriptive if uncreative title, “Looking for evidentiality (and mirativity) in Bantu” and aims to serve as a call for targeted research. Here is the abstract:

Although Bantu languages are not known for having grammaticalized and obligatory systems of evidentiality, research is uncovering more and more evidential contrasts and evidential strategies, as well as expressions of related categories like mirativity. In this article, I describe, with examples from the literature and my own research, two domains in which I believe targeted investigations are likely to uncover additional examples of evidential and mirative meanings. The first domain is quotatives, which very frequently have evidential and mirative functions, but which are largely underdescribed across Bantu. The second domain is tense and aspect, which is somewhat better described, but where little is known about associated evidential functions. I especially highlight cases in which two forms have overlapping denotative temporal or aspectual meanings, and evidential and similar contrasts can arise as a result.

Some of the ideas in this article were inspired by previous work with Hilde Gunnink, Ponsiano Kanijo, and Tim Roth, on a chapter about tense and aspect contrasts that contribute evidential meanings, which is due to be be published soon. Updates to come!

In the fall, I taught the course Language Ideologies and Linguistic Practices to a fascinating and diverse group of MA and BA students. The course’s main project was to produce a podcast episode on a related topic, and the students really came through! Topics included language attitudes in Helsinki, language standardization and minority languages, African multilingualism, and cultural attitudes towards silence.

You can listen to the podcast episodes here: https://languageideologies.podbean.com/

 

I picked up my complimentary author’s copies of this book from our semi-local “Afro & Asian” food shop on Wednesday (the Finnish postal system is full of mysteries). I was very excited to receive it, and I’m even more excited to have been a part of this publication, after many years of working to understand and apply Robert Botne’s Domains and Regions framework, which, in my opinion, can handle facets of (many) Bantu languages’ multiple time distinctions that other theories do not always address.

As always, it was a joy to work with Bob Botne and with Axel.

The volume is available for purchase at https://www.koeppe.de/titel_domains-and-regions-in-bantu-tense-and-aspect.

I spent much of the first part of this week attending the 52nd Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics online. Such a  breadth of topics — pursued in depth!  My talk, which I somewhat ambitiously titled “What modal
distinctions are salient in Nguni languages?”, attempted to summarize some of the major findings of our comparative study on modal expressions in South African Bantu languages thus far, and specifically dealt with the question of participant-internal vs. participant-external possibility categories (and the salience of the distinction), and with the less-commonly discussed, and, it turns out, somewhat confusingly named category of “existential” possibility.  The interaction with the audience was stimulating and my collaborators and I came away with new insights and directions for our ongoing studies. I am not a huge fan of attending conferences remotely as a rule (even as I prefer to avoid air travel whenever possible!), but I am nevertheless grateful to intrepid organizers of hybrid conferences everywhere for opening up their events to a much wider range of participants.

On Wednesday, I also gave an informal talk at our department coffee hour  with my thoughts on the meaning of “productivity”, and on organizing sane and humane individual and group workflows. I very briefly introduced Trello and showed some of the boards I’ve been using for my own work and (with sensitive information omitted!) those we’ve been using to organize our work at the journal.  Over the past several years, I’ve become extremely interested in the intersections of technology, attention, decision-making, and senses of time, and it was exciting to discuss some of my semi-developed ideas with colleagues.

Lotta Aunio, Richard Kerbs, and I have  a new paper in Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus: Penultimate lengthening in isiNdebele: A system and its variations. Abstract below:

Lengthening of the penultimate syllable in a word, phrase, or utterance is common across Bantu languages, especially in Eastern and Southern Bantu languages. Despite the prevalence of the general phenomenon, there is significant cross-linguistic diversity in how PUL is instantiated. The aim of this paper is to describe the PUL patterns and variation in isiNdebele, a Nguni language spoken in South Africa. IsiNdebele is closely related to Zulu and frequently spoken in situations of intense contact with Zulu, but its realisation of penultimate lengthening nevertheless shows important differences from what has been reported for Zulu and other Nguni languages. In addition, penultimate lengthening in isiNdebele shows significant internal variation, both across speakers and across utterances produced by the same speaker. This variation has implications for both phonological and syntactic analyses of this language: Many studies of phonological phrasing in other Nguni languages use penultimate length as the main phonetic cue for phrase boundaries, but a strict correlation between PUL and phrasing cannot be confirmed for isiNdebele. Lengthening also depends on factors such as speech rate, emphasis, and careful vs. casual speech.

In April, I had the great pleasure of attending the “Workshop on modality in underdescribed languages: Methods & insights” at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. It was organized by a group of editors and authors of the new volume of the same name (Modality in Underdescribed Languages: Methods and Insights, edited by Vander Klok, Rech and Guesser). I presented a paper discussing some methodological lessons I’ve while studying modal expressions in South African languages, and also co-presented, with Stefan Savić and Onelisa Slater, preliminary results from our  corpus study of modality in isiXhosa. I was honoured and thrilled to receive a copy of the new volume as a prize for “best abstract” (although I have to admit that it was a bit daunting to receive this distinction publicly, shortly before giving my presentation!). Most importantly, I gained new insights on methods and theoretical issues that will guide my work going forward. Many thanks to the organisers for their stellar work in planning the workshop, and to all the participants for the warm and encouraging atmosphere.

The workshop also included an excursion to the Humboldt Forum, which I highly recommend to anyone visiting Berlin!

I’m leaving tomorrow for Paris to give a keynote talk at the workshop Documenter et décrire les langues et littératures minoritaires et en danger à l’ère numérique : épistémologies, pratiques et défis at Inalco. It’s a star-studded workshop and I’m both excited and humbled to be speaking there. I’ll be discussing, among other things, community-based narrative analysis in Totela, a topic that has brought up a lot of memories and emotions, bringing what now feels like my ancient history as a graduate student back to the forefront of my mind.

Among all of the wonderful talks and extremely distinguished colleagues I’m looking forward to hearing and seeing, I’m particularly thrilled (and a bit nervous) to be meeting Ruth Finnegan, world expert in (among other things) African oral literature.

On June 9th, I’ll be presenting a paper co-authored with Remah Lubambo, Msuswa Petrus Mabena, Cordelia Nkwinika & Muhle Sibisi at the Bantu 9 conference, which is being held at Malawi University of Science and Technology this year. Very, very sadly, I am not able to attend the conference in person, but the conference has been running great in hybrid form.  I am very glad that I get to be part of it even though I couldn’t make the trip — even though I feel a little heart prick every time I see an old friend or colleague sitting in one of the conference rooms while I watch via Zoom.

Our presentation is called “Expressions of modal possibility in South African Nguni and Tsonga Languages”, and it compares the contexts in which several modal verbs and prefixes can and cannot be used in isiZulu, isiNdebele, isiXhosa, Siswati, and Xitsonga, respectively. We had a lot of fun developing the presentation, and we uncovered some interesting (apparent) crosslinguistic differences that beg for deeper investigation.