Browsing by Author "Watters, John"

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    East Benue-Congo
    (2018-07-18) Watters, John
    Chapter one introduces this volume on East Benue-Congo (EBC) and the chapters addressing issues of nouns, pronouns, and verbs within specific branches and EBC as a whole. The chapter identifies the location of EBC and its branches as well as the external and internal classification of EBC. It situates EBC's likely original homeland and the geography of its probable expansion routes that led to the current location of its branches. It then provides a context for the chapters focused on noun classes in EBC in general and nominal affixes in Kainji and Plateau in particular, as well as the reconstruction issues they raise. It also notes certain issues related to Bantoid and to the presence of the Bantu languages within Bantoid, especially its dominance within Bantoid that has the potential of skewing historical analyses.
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    East Benue-Congo: Nouns, Pronouns, And Verbs
    (2018-07-18) Watters, John
    This volume is the first in what hopefully will be a growing set of edited volumes and monographs concerning Niger-Congo comparative studies. This first volume addresses matters that are relevant to the entire East Benue-Congo family as well as the particular branches Kainji, Plateau, and Bantoid. In the case of Bantoid, the particular focus is on Grassfields and the Grassfields-Bantu borderland, though other Bantoid subgroups are referenced. The potential topics for comparative studies among these languages are numerous, but this volume is dedicated to presentations on nominal affixes, third person pronouns, and verbal extensions. A forthcoming volume will provide some results of reconstructions and lexicostatistics in Cross River, exploratory reconstructions in Southern Jukunoid, and reconstructions in Ekoid-Mbe and Mambiloid.
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    Tense in Proto-Bantu
    (2022-12-30) Nurse, Derek; Watters, John
    The focus of this chapter is the appearance of tense in Proto-Bantu (PB). Most Niger-Congo (NC) languages are aspect-prominent, having no tense contrasts, and the same is generally assumed for ancestral Proto-Niger-Congo. PB emerged from part of an eastern subgroup of NC to which we refer as Bantoid. Some 5000 years ago or earlier, tense was innovated at an early stage in a region along and to the east of the Cameroon Volcanic Line. This means that tense is not unique to PB but is inherited by PB from its forebears. We propose two lines of verbal development for Narrow Bantu (NB) based on the verbal phenomena we traced. The data did not always allow us to base our analysis on the strict application of the Comparative Method to the exponents of tense and aspect, but examination of specific systematic features of the verbal systems in NB and parts of Bantoid led us to infer plausible paths of verbal development to explain the data.