A Short Grammar Of The Shilluk Language

The first edition of the Practical Orthography of African Languages was a best-seller and this and the following volume re-issues the second edition, in English and French. Originally published in 1930, it provided an invaluable solution to the problem of finding a practical and uniform method of writing African languages. The volume is bound with a small pamphlet which analyses the information on the Semitic and cushitic languages of Eritrea, Ethiopia and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Related languages are grouped together into larger sections which have some linguistic significance. A further pamphlet, the Distribution of the Nilotic and Nilo-Hamitic Languages of Africa, describes the relationship between languages and dialects. For each language, data are given on locality, number of speakers, use for educational and religious purposes and the extent of vernacular literature. The linguistic material is set out in phonetic script with tone marks, though reference is made to current standard orthoraphies where these exist.

Originally published in 1956, this volume presents a survey of the non-Bantu languages in the area extending south of the Sahara from Lake Chad to the Indian Ocean, together withj those of South Africa. The arrangement is primarily linguistic, in as much as larger units which show some indisputable affinities are where possible treated contiguously. Languages in the centre of the total area are discussed first, followed by thos ein the west, north, east and finally south.

This book is a description of Luwo, a Western Nilotic language of South Sudan. Luwo is used by multilingual, dynamic communities of practice as one language among others that form individual and flexible repertoires. It is a language that serves as a means of expressing the Self, as a medium of art and self-actualization, and sometimes as a medium of writing. It is spoken in the home and in public spaces, by fairly large numbers of people who identify themselves as Luwo and as members of all kinds of other groups. In order to provide insights into these dynamic and diverse realities of Luwo, this book contains both a concise description and analysis of the linguistic features and structures of Luwo, and an approach to the anthropological linguistics of this language. The latter is presented in the form of separate chapters on possession, number, experiencer constructions, spatial orientation, perception and cognition. In all sections of this study, sociolinguistic information is provided wherever this is useful and possible, detailed information on the semantics of grammatical features and constructions is given, and discussions of theory-oriented approaches to various linguistic features of Luwo are presented.

This book explores a domain of discourse processing referred to as 'interactive grammar', based on an analysis of grammatical descriptions of over 100 languages spoken across the world. While much previous work has treated interactive grammar as a fairly marginal part of language, Bernd Heine describes it here as a distinct category that contrasts with sentence grammar both in its functions and its structural behavior. He identifies ten types of interactives - i.e. extra-clausal expressions of linguistic discourse: attention signals, directives, discourse markers, evaluatives, ideophones, interjections, response elicitors, response signals, social formulae, and vocatives. The analysis reveals that speakers make use of two contrasting modes for structuring their discourses, both of which are needed for successful communication: one is sentence grammar, which has a propositional format and analytic organization; the other is interactive grammar, which has a holophrastic organization and a focus on social communication. While the argument structure of sentence grammar is shaped by the propositional format of sentences, that of interactive grammar is shaped by the indexical nature of the situation of discourse. This distinction shows interesting correlations both with findings from neurolinguistic studies on differential activity in the two hemispheres of the human brain, and with observations from social psychology on the differences between systems of reasoning and judgment.