Research Articles (African Languages)

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Browsing Research Articles (African Languages) by Author "Dlali, Mawande"

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    The curse of poverty and marginalisation in language development : the case of Khoisan languages of Botswana
    (Department of General Linguistics, Stellenbosch University, 2019) Chebanne, Andy; Dlali, Mawande
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Khoisan languages are spoken by tiny and remote-dwelling communities of Botswana, the members of which are characterised by socio-economic hardships and illiteracy in their own languages and in general. Historically and socially, these people emerged from a life of hunting and gathering, and, in that lifestyle mode, they were easily subdued and exploited by other language communities for cheap and serf labour. Colonialism found them in this social state, and post-colonialism has left them in the same state. As poor and marginalised subalterns, they have not had any means to advocate for their language and culture, and are currently assimilated into other peoples’ languages and cultures. Consequently, the remaining languages of these communities, spoken in remote areas by poor people, are threatened with extinction because they remain under-developed, under-documented, and are at best still at the stage of documentation by anthropologists and linguists. As illiterate people, the speakers of these Khoisan languages have no survival strategies for their languages in this ever-evolving, modern world. With their poverty and sociolinguistic marginalisation, they are devoid of any means of promoting their languages. This discussion focuses on the pitiful situation of the Khoisan languages of Botswana. Botswana’s language-use policy will be critically examined and characterised as one factor in the marginalisation and disempowerment of minority groups, both of which lead to the languages’ endangerment and death.
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    The EK construction in Xhosa : a cognitive account
    (2017-11-29) Andrason, Alexander; Dlali, Mawande
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Developed within the frame of cognitive linguistics, this paper argues that the entire syntactic and semantic profile of the EK gram can be unified and viewed as coherent by modeling it as a map of different but related features. This understanding gives access both to the extreme variability of the EK form and to its internal cohesion, without equating this construction with one taxonomical category or postulating a set of invariant properties. The synchronic evidence demonstrates that the traits such as intransitivity, non-agentivity, resultativity/ stativity, and modality are prototypical. Other traits, e.g. (semi-)transitivity, (semi-)agentivity, spontaneity, and impetus are less prototypical or nonprototypical. The former class is psychologically associated with the EK gram, while the latter class does not enter into speakers’ representation of this form. The true cohesion of the EK gram is, however, recoverable only diachronically. The historical center of the map of the EK form corresponds to an in-/detransitive, agentless, resultative gram. This input construction has developed all the other properties visualized as components of the map (e.g. functions that are more transitive and more agentive, as well as stative and modal senses) by following a set of crosslinguistically common evolutionary tendencies or grammaticalization paths.