28.2547, Review: Dazaga; Nilo-Saharan; Language Documentation; Morphology; Phonology; Syntax: Walters (2016)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-28-2547. Thu Jun 08 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.2547, Review: Dazaga; Nilo-Saharan; Language Documentation; Morphology; Phonology; Syntax: Walters (2016)

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Date: Thu, 08 Jun 2017 14:22:42
From: Christopher Green [cgreen10 at syr.edu]
Subject: A Grammar of Dazaga

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-3041.html

AUTHOR: Josiah K. Walters
TITLE: A Grammar of Dazaga
SERIES TITLE: Grammars and Sketches of the World's Languages
PUBLISHER: Brill
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Christopher R Green, Syracuse University

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

INTRODUCTION
 
“A grammar of Dazaga” by Josiah Walters is the first reference grammar devoted
to the contemporary description of the Keshirda dialect of Dazaga, a
heretofore underdescribed language of the Nilo-Saharan family spoken across
large geographic portions of Niger and Chad; the language is most closely
related to Tedaga and somewhat more distantly to Beria, Kanuri, and Kanembu.
Walters’ stated focus in this grammar is both typological and descriptive, and
his approach is notably theoretically agnostic to the extent possible in
crafting such a work. The author states three goals of the grammar: i) to
describe the contemporary state of Dazaga; ii) to limit the scope of the
grammar to Dazaga itself, rather than the composite Dazaga-Tedaga, as
sometimes done in other works; and iii) to frame the description of Dazaga in
‘modern linguistic terminology and categories.’ The data upon which this
grammar were based is extensive. Much of the data were gathered over a span of
at least two decades in Niger by Kevin Walters, the author’s father, seemingly
under the auspices of SIL International. More recently, additional syntactic
and tonal data were collected via e-mail correspondence between the author and
consultants in Niger, as well as in person during a field trip to Niger in
2015.
 
SUMMARY
 
The Grammar of Dazaga contains nine chapters and is supplemented by
approximately 50 pages of glossed but unanalyzed supplemental sentence-length
examples. Chapter 1 provides an overview and introduction of the Daza people
and the Dazaga language. The author situates Dazaga alongside other Saharan
languages and includes some discussion of the challenges and controversies
surrounding establishing the genetic relatedness among these languages. It
quickly becomes clear that because so little work has been done on Dazaga
itself, Walters has relied heavily on comparable works on other Saharan
languages to drive his inquiry and to supplement his analysis. We learn that
Dazaga, like its closest relatives, is tonal and morphologically complex,
although this complexity is limited largely to its verbal system, as nouns and
adjectives have minimal morphology other than its set of phrasal enclitics
that primarily encode case. This introduction is followed in Chapter 2 by a
short review of the relevant literature on Dazaga, divided into early minor
works, major works, and recent minor works. In closing the chapter, the author
mentions a few other works on Saharan languages, more broadly.
 
Walters, in Chapter 3, turns to an overview of Dazaga phonology. He is frank
about the fact that this chapter is not exhaustive, nor is it in depth.
Indeed, the discussion of each topic is terse, and the chapter is replete with
tentative statements and a number of references to an unpublished phonological
sketch by Kevin Walters (2013) and a forthcoming monograph on the language’s
phonology. The chapter introduces the Dazaga consonant and vowel inventories,
but a ‘fuller presentation’ of the phonological facts is limited to only four
sub-sections devoted to phones or pairs of phones whose status and
distribution are either unclear or somewhat problematic in some way. As an
aside, I question why the author and/or the copy editor permitted the poorly
placed tie bars over affricates in the font selected for this grammar. At the
very least, this is a distraction; moreover, tie bars are not necessary in
transcriptions, but even so, there are certainly many other fonts that
accommodate them with no problem. Syllable structure is next discussed, and
while the facts are fairly straightforward, one unusual analytical choice is
the presence of onsetless word-final syllables. My assumption is that this
stems from and is related to the author’s blanket statement that glide
consonants cannot occur in a syllable coda, yet this is left unexplained. The
chapter closes with comments on tone, vowel harmony, three other phonological
processes (assimilation, dissimilation, and deletion), and a statement about
the adopted orthography.
 
Chapter 4 is a fairly brief description of nouns and other elements of noun
phrases. The discussion of nouns themselves is across less than three pages,
as the only morphology associated with Dazaga nouns at the word level pertains
to inflection for number and the derivation of diminutives. The presentation
of adjectives is similarly limited, after which personal and possessive
pronouns, which behave like nouns, are then introduced; demonstratives and
articles are also overviewed. The chapter closes with an introduction to
simple noun phrases with accompanying examples. It is not until Chapter 5 that
Walters begins to have more substantive commentary and analysis to relay. In
this chapter, the focus turns to verbs and thereby to a detailed description
of its morphosyntactic alignment and of its complex verbal morphology.
Walters’ argues, contrary to comparable analyses of other Saharan languages,
that Dazaga exhibits split-intransitivity in its verbal system. More
specifically, Walters focuses on those characteristics of Dazaga that make his
analysis distinct from that offered by Ortman (2003) on Tedaga, which is
argued to exhibit an ergative/absolutive system. Components of Walters’
analysis include a lack of unique verb ‘classes’ in Dazaga; he instead
proposes a single, unified verbal system from an agreement standpoint,
including a large sub-group of transitive verbs formed by a light verb
construction. Also important to Walters’ analysis of the Dazaga verbal system
is his proposal that morphemes encoding subject and object agreement are
affixes, rather than clitics. This determination is based on both
morphosyntactic and phonological criteria. In addition to hashing out
motivations for these more contentious details of the verb system, Walters
provides examples of verbs containing morphology associated with aspect
(imperfective, perfective, and progressive), mood (indicative, interrogative,
contingent, optative, imperative, and hortative), and voice (active,
reflexive, and passive).
 
Chapter 6 concerns itself with the structure of simple clauses, and more
specifically of many details underlying Walters’ analysis of case marking in
the language. The author situates his analysis alongside others that have
questioned the presence of case marking elsewhere in Saharan languages and
intimates that one of the key characteristics in establishing case marking
lies in understanding the distinction between postpositions and enclitics case
markers. Diagnostics for doing so include their behavior regarding vowel
harmony, morphological requirements on governed noun phrases, and their
behavior in relative clauses. A fairly tricky distinction that Walters
introduces is that although Dazaga exhibits split intransitivity in its verbal
system for subject and object markers, the language exhibits a tripartite case
marking system on verbal arguments that is not consistent with split
intransitivity. One place where this becomes clear is in the presence of a
case marker for so-called ergative case. Such ergative case marking is only
ever for the subject argument of a transitive verb, though it is not always
obligatory. Accusative case marking, on the other hand, is found on ‘primary’
object arguments of transitive verbs but is distinct from case marking found
on either the subject argument of transitive or intransitive verbs. Subject
arguments of intransitive verbs are unmarked in all instances. In addition to
these case markers, Dazaga also has genitive and dative case marking. While
Walters provides a convincing analysis of these facts, he intimates that he
recognizes there is much more to be done concerning the discourse factors that
contribute to case marking in the language overall. The remainder of the
chapter covers the structure of verbal clauses with different numbers of
arguments, and finally, clauses with non-verbal predicates.
 
Chapter 7 takes us from the simple clauses discussed in Chapter 6, to sentence
types, only to go back to the discussion of clausal combinations in Chapter 8.
Walters offers a brief explanation for his seemingly haphazard jumping back
and forth between constituents, but I do not find his explanation to be
successful in making it clear why these chapters have been divided as they
have. Walters starts off by saying that ‘sentence type’ can mean many things;
he uses it to divide sections based on clausal modality
(declarative/indicative, imperative, and interrogative), though he offers no
nod to modality. Furthermore, he tells us that, indeed, the chapter does not
even exclusively deal with issues of ‘sentence type,’ as it also includes
sections on topic dislocation, negation, focus, among other phenomena. The
organization of Chapter 8 is also muddled; while it is on clause combinations,
the first portion of the chapter is devoted to phrasal coordination. As one
might expect, there are sections devoted to the discussion of both complement
clauses and relative clauses, but these are separated by a discussion of
causatives. This is an unexpected place for such discussion, but seemingly
necessary as, according to Walters’ data (and contra earlier work by Lukas
1953 and Bryan 1971), synchronic Dazaga has no morphological causatives, only
clausal causatives formed by serial verb constructions and light verb
constructions.
 
EVALUATION
 
Barring a few questionable choices pertaining to chapter organization and the
two items of concern (one major, one fairly minor) mentioned below, Walters’
Dazaga grammar is a welcome contribution on a very understudied and
underdescribed language. The author should be applauded for producing such a
work, although I must question whether it might have been worthwhile to aim to
publish separate monographs or even several journal article length
contributions on specific topics before undertaking a full grammar. While the
author (I assume, on purpose) calls this a grammar of Dazaga, there is
certainly much more that could be added before it is the grammar of Dazaga.
The strength of the grammar is in its discussion of verbal morphology and
clause level syntax, and especially those topics that entail particularly
thorny analyses concerning case marking and morphological alignment more
broadly.
 
Walters’ work on these subjects could have stood alone as a monograph, and
perhaps in doing so, the contribution could have been stronger overall. A main
reason that I question this is that the author appears to have a
monograph-length description focused on Dazaga phonology (Walters forthcoming)
in the works. A morphosyntax monograph would have been a suitable
accompaniment to this phonological monograph, as the phonological component of
this grammar is by far its weakest aspect. Walters teases us by letting on
that Dazaga encodes both lexical and grammatical distinctions in its tonology,
but he tells us that we must simply wait with bated breath until his next
monograph comes out. Even from a segmental standpoint, there is fairly little
said outside of a few details concerning the language’s morphophonology. This
is especially troubling given the vast and oftentimes opaque alternations that
are found throughout the work; in the author’s own words, “the phonetic
shape...can change considerably depending on the phonological environment.”
This is a detail inserted only in Chapter 5 (pg. 78) rather than in the
chapter on phonology. Also disappointing are other blanket assumptions about
the language’s phonology concerning the behavior of glide consonants, its
syllable structure, and reference to strong vs. weak positions of a word with
no explanation as to where these occur. I can only hope that they are dealt
with in far more detail in the forthcoming monograph.
 
A second matter relates to the uncharacteristic abundance of cited ‘personal
communications’ between the author and Kevin Walters. We are informed at the
very beginning of the grammar that Kevin Walters is the author’s father and,
moreover, that the author was given many years worth of the elder Walters’
data. These are the data upon which a significant portion of the Dazaga
grammar have been based. While this exchange of data, itself, is in no way
troubling, what seems a bit odd to me are the many instances in which the
author chooses to nod via ‘personal communication’ to Kevin Walters in order
to elucidate or otherwise explain a given (and oftentimes non- transparent)
point. Without a doubt, the younger Walters is a well-trained linguist, as
clearly evidenced from his treatment of the aforementioned syntactic data
subsequently collected and analyzed. This said, it would seem to me that the
author could have greatly benefitted from working collaboratively with Kevin
Walters on this work. Such a collaboration could have strengthened the overall
product in a number of ways. First and foremost, it would have obviated the
need for these many personal communications which are stilted and draw from
the flow of the discussion and analysis. Moreover, because they are not based
upon any published or established material, they leave the reader at a
disadvantage in not being able to substantiate them otherwise.
 
REFERENCES
 
Bryan, Margaret Arminel. 1971. The verb classes in East Saharan languages. In
Veronika Six, Norbert Cyffer, Ludwig Gerhardt, Hilke Meyer-Bahlburg &Ekkehard
Wolff (eds.), Afrikanische Sprachen und Kulturen-ein Querschnitt, 224-234.
Hamburgː Deutsches Institut zur Afrikaforschung. Lukas, Johannes. 1953. Die
Sprache der Tubu in der zentralen Sahara. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Ortman,
Mark. 2003. Teda verb classes and their morphology in light of verbal
paradigms. Unpublished ms.
 
N’Djaména, Chad: SIL. Walters, Josiah. forthcoming. Issues in the phonology of
Dazaga. Walters, Kevin L. 2013. Phonological sketch of Dazaga (Keshirda of
Niger). Unpublished ms.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Christopher Green is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Syracuse
University in the Department of Languages, Literatures, & Linguistics. His
research covers a variety of topics related to prosodic structure and tone. He
has published on a number of African languages, including Bambara, Susu,
Somali, and Wanga.





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