Project

Is it syntax and/or discourse? A combined corpus and historical-comparative linguistic approach to the conjoint/disjoint alternation in East-African West Highlands Bantu

Code

01W06324

Duration

01 October 2024 → 30 September 2029

Funding

Regional and community funding: Special Research Fund

Promotor

Koen Bostoen

Research disciplines

Humanities and the arts
- African languages
- Corpus linguistics
- Historical linguistics

Keywords

Bantu Great Lakes region of Eastern Africa historical-comparative linguistics corpus linguistics pragmatics syntax verb conjugation aspect & tense

Project description

My PhD-project combines a corpus and historical-comparative linguistic approach to the conjoint/disjoint alternation in West Highlands Bantu, a group of closely related languages from the Great Lakes region of Eastern Africa including Kirundi and Kinyarwanda. The in-depth study of this grammatical phenomenon involves building a new Kinyarwanda corpus and collecting new fieldwork data in four poorly known languages from Tanzania.