[Lingtyp] CfP: The associative construction and friends within Niger-Congo: When nouns unite (WS5 @ ICHL27, Santiago de Chile)

Mon Sep 9 17:20:55 UTC 2024

Apologies for cross-posting

*WS Title*: The associative construction and friends within Niger-Congo:
When nouns unite
*Workshop Location: *27th International Conference on Historical
Linguistics (ICHL27), Santiago de Chile, 18-22 August 2025
*Workshop Type*: in-person
*Organizers*: Rebecca Paterson & Hugh Paterson III
*Abstract Deadline*: October 18th, 2024
*Abstract Details*: Maximum 800 words, excluding references.
*Submission*: Email PDF of abstracts to both r.paterson at princeton.edu and
i at hp3.me
*Note*: Workshops are in most cases restricted to 6 papers; all other
papers, if accepted, will be given as part of the ICHL general sessions. If
there is sufficient interest for an extended workshop (up to 12 papers), we
will lobby the local organizers to permit this format.
*Workshop Website*:
https://hughandbecky.us/Becky-CV/project/ichl27-workshop-associative-construction/
*Conference Website*: https://ichl27santiago.cl
*Publication*: We are pursuing publication via edited volume post-workshop.

Please direct questions to Rebecca Paterson r.paterson at princeton.edu

*Workshop description*:

The associative construction and friends within Niger-Congo: When nouns
unite

The noun phrase is highly important to communication and is significant
within historical-comparative work (e.g., wordlists). Noun phrase internal
constituency and order is correlated with discourse pragmatics and
sentence-level syntax in African languages (e.g., evolutionary syntax). We
propose a workshop discussing and exploring the evolution of the range and
forms of the associative construction both within and beyond the noun
phrase.

Across Niger-Congo, the common Noun-Noun construction (also known as the
associative construction per Welmers, 1963; a.k.a., connective, e.g.,
Meeussen 1967;  connexive, e.g., Schadeberg 1995:176, and genitive, e.g.,
Benson 2020) has different interpretive meanings and invokes a variety of
morpho-phonological forms. These forms in turn have various
information-structure implications and communicative impacts. The
associative construction has been discussed for certain sub-branches of
Niger-Congo (e.g., Bantu, see Van de Velde 2013). The full range of
functions of Welmers’ associative construction is little explored
synchronically or diachronically.

While the syntax of the structure is consistently [N Assoc N], variations
on the form of the associative marker itself are diverse as seen in
examples 1a-e where the form can take the shape of a low vowel, a low tone,
or in some languages a high tone. The canonical form for Bantu is proposed
as AG-a; that is, a root -a which is preceded by a noun class agreement
prefix (Meeussen 1967), and later Van de Velde (2013: 219). The exact
morpho-phonological shape of the construction varies from language to
language.

(1)
a. Kagulu [kki] (Bantu; Tanzania; Petzell 2008: 86, as cited in Van de
Velde 2013: 217)
m-eji g-a mu-nyu
6-water AG6-CON 3-salt
‘salt water’

b. Swahili [swa] (Bantu; Welmers 1963: 433)
maji y-a chumvi
{water AG-ASSOC salt }
‘salt water (water associated with salt)’

c. ut-Ma’in [gel] (Kainji; Nigeria; Paterson 2019: 264)
swā   d-  ̀ =u-rwág
nose AG5-ASSOC =C7-elephant
‘elephant trunk’ (ɘ̄r-swā ‘C5-nose’;  ū-rwág ‘C7-elephant’)

d. Kwakum [kwu] (Bantu; Cameroon; Louagie et al. 2023)
ndètɛ̀ ´ -kɛ̀ɛ̀
big CON -fish
‘the big fish’ (~ the being big/bigness of the fish)

e. Igbo [ibo] (Kwa; Nigeria; Welmers & Welmers 1969: 316)
ímé ꜜíkó
inside cup
‘inside of a cup’ (ímé ‘inside’; ìkó ‘cup’; ASSOC conveyed by tonal
downstep)

Within the noun phrase, various semantic relationships or functions between
the nouns are described for the associative construction including:
possessive (example 3), part-whole (specific-general) (example 1-c.),
material-composition (thing-compositional material) (example 2-a),
person-place (person from a place), place of use, and time of use. At the
clause level, these same constructions can convey semantics related to
method, utility (material), location, time, and cause.

(2) Swahili [swa] (Bantu; Welmers 1963: 433)
material: nyumba z-a mawe
‘houses made of stone’
material: alikifanya kw-a mti
‘he made it out of wood’
(3) Mumuye [mzm] (Adamawa; Shimizu 1983, as in Cahill 2000: 37)
kìn + kpàǹtī –> kìń kpàǹtī
chicken chief ‘chief’s chicken’

The [N Assoc N] construction therefore sits at the apex of phonological,
syntactic, and semantic evolution. The evolution of semantic uses (Evans
2012: 201) may affect clauses on different evolutionary trajectories from
morpho-phonological sound changes. Therefore, the rather productive and
promiscuous associative construction can become involved in independent
evolutionary trajectories, e.g., phonological sound changes and semantic
uses. The proposed workshop welcomes studies which illustrate the
associative construction from any Niger-Congo language, from a
historical-comparative or internal-reconstruction perspective. Of
particular interest are those studies which discuss the evolution of forms
or functions related to noun-noun constructions from Gur, Adamawa, Dogon,
Ubangi, and other purported Niger-Congo branches with constructions
parallel to identified associative constructions in other branches.

*References*
Benson, Peace. 2020. “A Description of Dzә (Jenjo) Nouns and Noun Phrases,
an Adamawa Language of Northeastern Nigeria.” Asian and African Studies
(Publication of Saint Petersburg State University) 12 (4): 490–504.
https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu13.2020.402.

Cahill, Michael. 2000. “Tonal Associative Morphemes in Optimality Theory.”
VARIA: Working Papers in Linguistics 53: 31–70.
https://linguistics.osu.edu/research/pubs/papers/archive

Evans, V. 2010. “Evolution of Semantics.” In Concise Encyclopedia of
Philosophy of Language and Linguistics, edited by Alex Barber and Robert J.
Stainton, 196–204. Oxford; Boston: Elsevier.

Louagie, Dana, Elisabeth Njantcho Kouagang, and Mark Van de Velde. 2023.
“Kwakum Nominal Expressions: Constructional Exuberance.” Presented at the
56th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Athens, Greece.

Meeussen, Achille Emile. 1967. “Bantu Grammatical Reconstructions.”
Africana Linguistica 3 (1): 79–121. https://doi.org/10.3406/aflin.1967.873.

Paterson, Rebecca Dow Smith. 2019. “Nominalization and Predication in
U̱t-Maꞌin.” Doctoral dissertation, Eugene, Oregon: University of Oregon.
Scholarsbank - University of Oregon.
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/25259.

Shimizu, Kiyoshi. 1983. The Zing Dialect of Mumuye: A Descriptive Grammar
with a Mumuye-English Dictionary and an English-Mumuye Index. Hamburg:
Helmut Buske.

Van De Velde, Mark. 2013. “The Bantu Connective Construction.” In The
Genitive, edited by Anne Carlier and Jean-Christophe Verstraete, 217–52.
Case and Grammatical Relations Across Languages 5. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/cagral.5.08vel.

Welmers, William E. 1963. “Associative a and ka in Niger-Congo.” Language
39 (3): 432–47. https://doi.org/10.2307/411125.

Welmers, William E., and Beatrice F. Welmers. 1969. “Noun Modifiers in
Igbo.” International Journal of American Linguistics 35 (4): 315–22.
https://doi.org/10.1086/465076.
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