A01=Francis O. Egbokhare
A01=Ronald P. Schaefer
African linguistics
African studies
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
archaeology
Author_Francis O. Egbokhare
Author_Ronald P. Schaefer
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Benue Congo
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=CF
COP=United States
declension classes
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
Edoid
eq_bestseller
eq_dictionaries-language-reference
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
ethnology
gender loss
grammatical number
historical linguistics
indicative
language change
language endangerment
Language_English
linguistic anthropology
minority language shift
morphology
Niger Congo
Nigeria
noun class
noun class marking
noun classes
PA=Available
prehistory
Price_€100 and above
Proto Edoid
PS=Active
Reduced inflection
sociolinguistics
softlaunch
subjunctive
tonal alternation
tonal morphology
tonosyntax
typology
West Africa
West African languages
Product details
- ISBN 9781498542722
- Weight: 594g
- Dimensions: 158 x 232mm
- Publication Date: 11 Nov 2019
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Class Marking in Emai examines the retention, reduction, and transformation of inflectional resources pertaining to noun class in Emai, an Edoid language of south-central Nigeria. Ronald P. Schaefer and Francis O. Egbokhare demonstrate that in contrast to its Bantu relations, Emai retains form class prefixes on a relatively small group of nouns that distribute across eleven declension sets. Prefix addition rather than prefix alternation arises when ideophonic adverbials become syntactically displaced due to information structure and when Emai borrows lexical items from other languages. Reduction is evident in two primary domains: agreement class or gender and prefixes that alternate to express form class and grammatical number. As for transformation, it characterizes tonal, nominal and pronominal domains. Putting Emai and its noun class system into a broader cultural and archaeological context of historical language change, this book explores what it means to be a Benue Congo language with a reduced inflectional system.
Ronald P. Schaefer is professor emeritus at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
Francis O. Egbokhare is professor in the Department of Linguistics and African Languages at the University of Ibadan.
