Swahili

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    Linguistic Complexity: A Case Study From Swahili
    (2018-05-23) Jerro, Kyle
    This paper addresses the question of linguistic complexity in Swahili, a Bantu language spoken in East and Central Africa. Literature on linguistic complexity in other languages has argued that high levels of second-language learning affect linguistic complexity over time. Swahili serves as an ideal case study for this question because it has been used as a lingua franca for several centuries. I compare the phonological and morphological systems in Swahili to five other related Bantu languages, as well as compare all six languages to the original Proto-Bantu systems. The results of the study show that there is no decrease in phonological or morphological complexity in (standard) Swahili when compared to other closely related Bantu languages, though the grammar has strongly diverged from the other related languages.
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    Towards A Unified Theory Of Morphological Productivity In The Bantu Languages: A Corpus Analysis Of Nominalization Patterns In Swahili
    (2018-05-23) Kloehn, Nick
    Models arguing for a connection between morphological productivity and relative morpheme frequency have focused on languages with relatively low average morpheme to word ratios. Typologically synthetic languages like Swahili which have relatively high average morpheme to word ratios present a challenge for such models. This study investigates the process of agentive nominalization from the perspective of the Dual Route Model. The findings suggest that all agentive nominal forms should decompose when accessed and thus that speakers of Swahili should include these morphemes in their lexical inventory apart from root morphemes. This process appears to not be influence by noun classification, or verbal derivation.
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    On The Derivation Of Swahili 'amba' Relative Clauses: Evidence For Movement
    (2019-08-13) Gould, Isaac; Scott, Tessa
    This paper brings together two disparate strands of research in the literature on relative clauses (RCs) in Swahili. Our focus is to provide a unified analysis of various data involving a particular kind of head-external RC, namely amba-RCs. Our interest is in whether these RCs involve movement of the head from inside the RC to its external position (i.e. head raising). To investigate this, we look at scope interactions between a quantified RC-head and some other quantifier. We propose a diagnostic test using constraints on long-distance QR (LDQR) from Fox (2000) to provide evidence for the following claims: amba-RCs involve head raising, and amba-RCs are not islands for overt syntactic movement.
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    When Northern Swahili Met Southern Somali
    (2019-08-13) Nurse, Derek
    Some twelve hundred years an incipient Northern Swahili community had moved up the Kenya coast as far as the Lamu Archipelago, where it came in contact with one or more Somali communities and the isolate Dahalo community. This paper initially uses phonological innovations in the early Swahili dialect to establish the general fact of contact, and then attempts to use sets of loanwords to identify the Somali source. Due to inadequate sources, it has proved difficult to identify the source(s) with certainty but initial contact with Tunni over some centuries, followed by later contact with Garre, is the most plausible explanation. The Tunni and Garre later exited, the latter leaving strong traces behind in Boni.
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    Learning Swahili Morphology
    (2022-03-29) Goldsmith, John; Mpiranya, Fidele
    We describe the results of automatic morphological analysis of a large corpus of Swahili text, the Helsinki corpus, using Linguistica, an unsupervised learner of morphology. The result is a fine-grained analysis, with some results corresponding to the familiar linguistic analysis, and with others that are possible only with exact quantitative measures available with computational analysis. The prefixal inflectional morphology is largely done well, while the suffixal morphology is successfully analyzed in some cases and not in others.
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    The Pragmatics Of Swahili Relative Clauses
    (2022-03-29) Mwamzandi, Mohamed
    Several studies explain the variation of the Swahili relative clause (RC) from a syntactic perspective. These studies discuss the derivational and structural differences/similarities between the amba RC and the tensed RC. In this study, the choice between the amba and tensed RCs is explained from a pragmatic perspective. 440 RCs were extracted from the Helsinki Corpus of Swahili. The dataset was then coded for various variables including relative marker (amba/tensed), relative type (restrictive/non-restrictive), length (number of words used), and information status (topic/non-topic). The results show that the tensed RCs are mostly restrictive while the amba RCs are mostly non-restrictive. Further, the mean length of the amba RC is higher than of the tensed RC. It was observed that the amba RC is preferred in topic shift transition, that is, when a non-topic NP becomes the topic NP in the following utterance while the tensed RC is preferred in continue transition, that is, if the topic of the matrix clause is the same as that of the RC.