linguistics of kinyarwanda kyle jerro university of texas at austin muri annual meeting november 2,...
TRANSCRIPT
Linguistics of Kinyarwanda
Kyle JerroUniversity of Texas at Austin
MURI Annual Meeting November 2, 2012
Fieldwork in Rwanda• 3 Months over Summer
2012• Worked in Gitarama and
Kigali
What We’ve Learned About Kinyarwanda:
• Locative morphology has lost its prior grammatical function
• Disentangled phonological processes on certain lexical stems
• Serial verbs 1) exist and 2) are more complicated than in other Bantu
• Animals are actually humans
Applicative Morphology
• Umw-arimu y-andik-ish-a i-baruwa i-karamu.CL1-teacher CL1-write-INST-IMP CL9-letter CL6-pen“The teacher is writing the letter with a pen.”
• Umw-arimu y-andik-ish-a i-karamu i-baruwa .CL1-teacher CL1-write-INST-IMP CL6-pen CL9-letter “The teacher is writing the letter with a pen.”
Free word order of objects; differs from Kimenyi (1980) grammar
Applicative/Causative Morphology
• Ambiguities arise due to free word order• Umu-gabo a-kubit-ish-a umu-gore aba-na.
CL1-man CL1-beat-CAUS-IMP CL1-woman CL2-children“The man made the woman beat the children” OR“The man made the children beat the woman.”
Locative Morphology has Changed
• Kimenyi (1980) Style:– Aba-hungu ba-ndik-a-ho i-baruwa i-shuri.
CL2-boys CL2-write-IMP-LOC CL9-letter CL9-school“The boys are writing the letter in the school.”
• Field Work:– Aba-hungu ba-ndik-a-ho i-baruwa i-shuri.
CL2-boys CL2-write-IMP-LOC CL9-letter CL9-school“The boys are writing the letter there.”
– Mw-a-ramutse-ho.2PL-PST-spend.night-LOC“Very good morning to you.”
Lexical Stems
• Lexical stem alternation of transitivity marked with /r/ (intransitive) and /z/ (transitive)– E.g. kw-icar-a `to sit (intr)’
kw-icaz-a `to seat (tr)’
kw-itsamur-a `sneeze (intr)’kw-itsamuz-a `sneeze (tr)’
Spans a variety of lexical classes, verb types, lexical alternations
Phonology
• Phonology obscured many of these examples:Ku-zur-a `to be full (intr)’ yuzuy-e `be filled (intr)’Ku-zuz-a `to fill (tr)’ yujuj-e `filled up
(tr)’ • Rule: /r/ [y] before /e/• Rule: /z/ [j] before /e/
Serial Verbs
• Umu-hungu a-ra-ririmbir-a a-ra-rangur-a. CL1-boy CL1-PRES-sing-IMP CL1-PRES-loudly-
IMP“The boy is singing loudly.”
• Only a handful of English-style adverbs exist– Cyane (many), ejo (yesterday/tomorrow)
Agreement Clash
• In-tare y-ish-e in-zovu.CL9-lion CL1-kill-PERF CL9-elephant“The lion killed the elephant.”
• Class 9 (Animals) is starting to show Class 1 (Human) agreement – ? Intare zishe inzovu. – Happens in some dialects of Swahili (Greville
Corbett p.c.)
Conclusion
• Fieldwork and corpora studies have illuminated an array of undocumented structures.
• This new linguistic knowledge is crucial for correctly modeling the language, be it for theoretic or computational purposes.