This reference grammar is the first ever description of West Africa’s Edoid language Emai. It incorporates narrative, lexical and grammatical field results over the last three decades. Treated are morphology, syntax and argument structure after an introductory phonology and orthographic overview highlighting grammatical and lexical tone. Individual chapters delineate noun and verb phrase structure as well as clause shape in discourse and clause combination. Noun inflection and derivation are detailed as is verb inflection in the context of tense, aspect and modality. Noun phrase character encompasses remnant noun classes, nominal modification types and pronoun forms followed by conjunction. Verb phrase features include complex predicates, both verbs in series and verb plus postverbal particle, functionally distinct copulas, double objects, and sentence complement types constrained by matrix verb. Also analyzed are preverbal and postverbal adverbials relative to information question types. Multi-clause constructions are profiled as to coding varieties across dependent clauses as well as precedence relations. A concluding chapter presents a sample narrative in orthographic form, interlinear gloss and English free translation.

For the thirty-third consecutive year, the Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL) has provided the major forum for the discussion of linguistic data geared towards understanding how African languages are constituted, acquired and used. This volume represents a selection of 25 peer-reviewed papers from the 33rd AWAL held in March 2002 at Ohio University in Athens. The papers cover language acquisition, syntax, phonetics, phonology, morphology, historical linguistics, as well as language use and function in Africa.

This rich volume deals comprehensively with cross-linguistic variation in the morphosyntax of ditransitive constructions: constructions formed with verbs (like give) that take Agent, Theme and Recipient arguments. For the first time, a broadly cross-linguistic perspective is adopted. The present volume, consisting of an overview article and twenty-odd in-depth studies of ditransitive constructions in individual languages from different continents, arose from the conference on ditransitive constructions held at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig) in 2007. It opens with the editors' survey article providing an overview of cross-linguistic variation in ditransitive constructions, followed by the questionnaire on ditransitive constructions, compiled by the editors in order to elicit various properties of these patterns. The editors' overview discusses formal properties of ditransitive constructions as well as behavioral (or syntactic) and lexical properties (i.e., the extension of ditransitive constructions across different verb classes). The volume includes 23 contributions describing properties of ditransitive constructions in languages from all over the world, written by leading experts. Care has been taken that the contributions to the volume will be representative of structural, geographic and genealogical diversity in the domain of ditransitive constructions. Thus the present volume provides a unique source of information on typological diversity of ditransitive constructions. It is expected that it will be of central interest to all scholars and advanced students of linguistics, especially to those working in the field of language typology and comparative syntax.

For more than a quarter of a century the Annual conference on African Linguistics (ACAL) has provided a lively forum for the confrontation of ideas on theoretical linguistics with descriptive data on African languages.

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The present volume represents a selection of papers presented at the International Symposium on Ideophones held in January 1999 in St. Augustin, Germany. They center around the following hypotheses: Ideophones are universal; and constitute a grammatical category in all languages of the world; ideophones and similar words have a special dramaturgic function that differs from all other word classes: they simulate an event, an emotion, a perception through language. In addition to this unique function, a good number of formal parallels can be observed. The languages dealt with here display strikingly similar patterns of derivational processes involving ideophones. An equally widespread common feature is the introduction of ideophones via a verbum dicendi or complementizer. Another observation concerns the sound-symbolic behavior of ideophones. Thus the word formation of ideophones differs from other words in their tendency for iconicity and sound-symbolism. Finally it is made clear that ideophones are part of spoken language — the language register, where gestures are used — rather than written language.