Tonal Ezafe in Mombo

Authors

  • Kirill N. Prokhorov Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences, 1, Bolshoy Kislovsky per., Moscow, 125009, Russian Federation

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu13.2022.305

Abstract

Tones are used in Mombo to distinguish between both lexical and grammatical meanings. As in other Dogon languages Mombo they play a crucial role in the NP, where syntactic relations are coded through the word order accompanied by tonal changes in nouns, adjectives, and numerals, occurring at the left edge of NP. The paper aims to describe the tonal marking of the lexical head and its dependents in Mombo as a manifestation of a grammatical category similar to construct state in Semitic or ezafe in Turkic and West Iranian. Ezafe in Mombo expresses the fact that the head has a dependent of a certain type: a possessor, an adjective, a demonstrative. According to the type of dependent one can identify possessive, attributive, and demonstrative ezafe. These are considered as individual grammemes of ezafe category. Ezafe is assigned locally, i. e. within the same constituent that contains its controller (the dependent) and applies to constituents rather than to words. The analysis of constructions with two dependents, one of which is the possessor to the left of the head noun and the other is an adjective, a numeral or a demonstrative suggests that the ezafe is assigned in a special position.

Keywords:

Dogon languages, head marking, ezafe, tonology, syntax

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References

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Published

2022-11-07

How to Cite

Prokhorov, K. N. (2022). Tonal Ezafe in Mombo. Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Asian and African Studies, 14(3), 449–468. https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu13.2022.305

Issue

Vol. 14 No. 3 (2022)

Section

Linguistics

License

Articles of "Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Asian and African Studies" are open access distributed under the terms of the License Agreement with Saint Petersburg State University, which permits to the authors unrestricted distribution and self-archiving free of charge.