Edited by Osamu Hieda, Christa König and Hiroshi Nakagawa
Is Africa a linguistic area (Heine & Leyew 2008)? The present volume consists of sixteen papers highlighting the linguistic geography of Africa, covering, in particular, southern Africa with its Khoisan languages. A wide range of phenomena are discussed to give an overview of the pattern of social,… read more
Over the last decades, the nature of social exchange has become an increasingly popular topic of discourse linguistics. The present paper focuses on one particular aspect of the on-going debate. It is based on the model of interactive grammar (Heine 2023), resting on the comparative analysis of… read more
Language endangerment in Africa is of a different kind than it is in many other parts of the world. Globalization and the impact of languages such as English, French, or Portuguese are not a major problem for the maintenance of African languages. Language loss is no less a factor in Africa than it… read more
On African standards, the Kuliak language Ik is one of the few languages with an elaborated case system: Seven cases are distinguished by nominal suffixes. Case is highly productive. Nearly all elements of the language are at least to some extent case inflected: Nouns, adverbs, adpositions, verbs,… read more
!Xun (also known as Jul'hoan) is essentially an isolating language. Phonetically it represents one of the most complex languages of the world (see Heikkinen 1986). It shows a productive serial verb construction (Svc) which has properties of compounding. Although nearly all verbs of the language can… read more
Africa is a continent where grammaticalized case systems are a rare phenomenon. But there is one exception: East Africa is a region where there is a relatively high occurrence of case languages (that is, languages with a grammaticalized case system). With regard to the type of case systems which… read more
