Doctoral Degrees (African Languages)
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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (African Languages) by Subject "Complexity (Linguistics)"
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- ItemA complex system of complex predicates: tense, taxis, aspect and mood in Basse Mandinka from a grammaticalisation and cognitive perspective(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2016-03) Andrason, Alexander; Visser, Marianna Wilhelmina; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of African Languages.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The present work analyses the Basse Mandinka tense-taxis-aspect-mood verbal system within the framework of cognitive and grammaticalisation linguistics and from the perspective of complexity theory. The author builds his study by pursuing the following more specific – gradually more macroscopic and systematic – objectives: (a) a description of the entire semantic potential of all the Basse Mandinka verbal grams; (b) a representation of the synchronic inventories of senses of each Basse Mandinka verbal construction as a coherent phenomenon, i.e. as a kinetic qualitative map ordered by means of grammaticalisation templates or paths; (c) an introduction of the information concerning the prototypicality of the map and the development of a bi-dimensional representation of the meaning as a wave; (d) a construction of streams that contain gram-waves organised along similar evolutionary templates; and (e) a modelling of the entire Basse Mandinka verbal organisation into a system of currents. This system – visualised as an ocean – is demonstrated to have characteristics typical to complex bodies: it is open, situated, fuzzy, full of unstable individuals, highly cardinal, uncontrollable, dynamic, metastable, past dependant, nonlinear, sensitive to initial conditions, deterministically chaotic in some regions, non-additive, non-resultant, but containing emergent properties, structurally intricate, self-organising and characterised by top-down causation and bottom-up causation. Additionally, as far as its methodological properties are concerned, the representation is incomplete, provisional and pluralistic in agreement with models of real-world complexity.