Author: Koen Bostoen

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From April 17 to May 8, 2024, the CongUbangi team and associated researchers carried out a first joint fieldwork mission in Gemena and Libenge, in the province of Sud-Ubangi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The linguistic team consisted of Sara Pacchiarotti, Jean-Pierre Donzo Bunza, Paulin Baraka Bose, and Chrisnah Renaudot Mfouhou. The archaeological team consisted of Peter Coutros, Igor Matonda, Holy Ondel Ilo (Institut des Musées Nationaux du Congo), Lucien Pierre Nguerede and Henri Zana. The team collected new linguistic, archaeological and genetic data and worked in close collaboration with local partners. More info is available here.

The CongUbangi project funded by an ERC Starting Grant awarded to Prof. Sara Pacchiarotti, which started at the beginning of 2024, has launched a new website.

On May 16 2024, Elisabeth (Lis) Kerr , who is currently finishing her PhD research at Leiden University (Netherlands), obtained a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship from the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) for research on a project titled “Modelling Bantu Analytic Morphosyntax (MBAM): The Mbam languages as a case study in morphosyntactic change“. The abstract can be found below. Her research will be co-hosted by BantUGent (under the supervision of Prof. Koen Bostoen) and ΔiaLing (under the co-supervision of Prof. Anne Breitbarth and Prof. Alexandra Simonenko). Welcome to BantUGent, Lis!

Abstract

Over time and space, languages can change fundamentally in their structure (morphosyntax). A key example of such variation is the change between analytic and synthetic morphosyntax. Such variation is clearly visible within Niger-Congo, the world’s largest language phylum. On the synthetic side, the Bantu family is particularly well-known in theoretical linguistics for its complex verb forms. Bantu’s closest relatives within Niger-Congo’s Benue-Congo branch, on the other hand, show much more analytic morphosyntax, expressing in multiple words what many Bantu languages typically express using a single verb form. While it is clear that morphosyntactic change has taken place within the Niger-Congo phylum, it is still debated in what direction(s) this change occurred and how such change can be captured in formal models. This debate within Niger-Congo studies reflects a more general question about variation and directionality of morphosyntactic change crosslinguistically. This project will contribute to this theoretical debate about the mechanisms of analytic ↔ synthetic morphosyntactic change by using a case study of the Mbam languages of Cameroon, a group of closely-related Bantu languages with an intermediary morphosyntactic profile. By developing a model to capture the synchronic and diachronic variation in the degree of analyticity of the Mbam languages, the results will contribute to the fields of historical linguistics, theoretical syntax, and African languages.

On May 15 2024, Arnaud Bizongwako (University of Burundi) obtained a 24-month PhD scholarship from the UGent Special Research Fund (BOF) for his joint PhD project titled “Is it syntax and/or discourse? A combined corpus and historical-comparative linguistic approach to the conjoint/disjoint alternation in East-African West Highlands Bantu“. West Highlands Bantu is a group of closely related languages from the Great Lakes region of Eastern Africa including Kirundi and Kinyarwanda. The in-depth study of this grammatical phenomenon involves building a new Kinyarwanda corpus and collecting new fieldwork data in four poorly known languages from Tanzania.  At the University of Burundi in Bujumbura, Arnaud will be supervised by Prof. Ferdinand Mberamihigo, who obtained himself in 2014 a joint PhD degree at Ghent University (UGent) and Brussels University (ULB) and is a BantUGent associate. Within BantUGent, Arnaud will be co-supervised by Prof. Koen Bostoen and Prof. Gilles-Maurice de Schryver, whom also co-supervised Ferdinand Mberamihigo earlier on. Welcome to BantUGent, Arnaud!

On May 13-14, the OriKunda project (ANR-22-CE54-0009) led by Rozenn Guérois (LLACAN CNRS) is having a two-day workshop at LLACAN CNRS, 7 rue Guy Môquet, 94800 Villejuif (Paris). The workshop is titled “Disentangling Zambezi Valley population history: Why historians need linguists (and vice versa)” and can also be atttended online through Zoom (password: 1nda03). The full program is available here. It includes presentations by BantUGent people: Koen Bostoen, Maud Devos, Hilde Gunnink, Edward Ntonda, Nina van der Vlugt, and Aron Zahran.

On Tuesday May 7, 2024, the start-up meeting for the RJ-funded project “Modality in Swahili – Variation, Change and Transfer” (P23-0101) took place at Gothenburg University. It was organized by Rasmus Bernander (Gothenburg University), together with Gilles-Maurice de Schryver (BantUGent), Maud Devos (BantUGent), and Ponsiano Kanijo (University of Dar es Salaam). The program is available here.

From the project abstract:

Despite being a large, vibrant and socio-politically dominant language across the whole of East Africa, with a longstanding history of written records, several aspects of the Bantu language Swahili and its varieties have still not been coherently researched. One such under-explored area of the Swahili language is that of modality, viz. linguistic expressions such as can, must and perhaps that refer to the non-factual status of a proposition. This is surprising, not least since the Swahili modal system may offer important insights into contact-induced change, as many of its modals were originally borrowed and then spread to many other East African languages.

The aim of this project is to offer the first detailed and comprehensive account of expressions of modality in Swahili, focusing on the role of contact-induced variation and change through time and space. This will be accomplished through both corpus-driven research – to which end the world’s largest diachronic Swahili corpus will be developed – and comparative-typological work (including fieldwork) targeting East African languages that show Swahili influence in their modal systems.

Operationalizing the growing research interests in both Bantu modality and Swahili-related linguistic variation and change we address the broader questions on the socio-historical causes and cognitive constraints underpinning the trajectories of development within the domain of modality in Swahili and in the East African region.

Koen Bostoen (BantUGent), Peter Coutros (BantUGent), Jessamy Doman (BantUGent), Cesar Fortes-Lima (Johns Hopkins University), Sara Pacchiarotti (BantUGent) and Carina Schlebusch (Uppsala University) presented online on “Climate change, population collapse and early settlement of Bantu speakers south of the Congo Forest” at the “The Language of Extreme Events” conference at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena  (April 22-23, 2024). The entire program is available here. The book of abstracts can be consulted here.

On March 21 and 22, 2024, an international workshop on  “Dialogues in Swahili and Bantu linguistics” took place at Osaka University to celebarate the career and retirement of Prof. Nobuko Yoneda, who used to be a partner in the ILCAA-BantUGent Joint Research Project “The Past and Present of Bantu Languages: Integrating Micro-Typology, Historical-Comparative Linguistics and Lexicography”.

The full program is available here. Koen Bostoen (BantUGent) was invited to present a talk titled “Bantu Language divergence and convergence and deep-time population history in the Lower Kasai area (DR Congo)”.

At the occasion of this celebration, a special issue of the Journal of Swahili and African Studies (n°35, 2024) was published including an article titled “Noncausal/Causal Alternations and the Rise of Lability in Ngwi (West-Coastal Bantu, B861)” by Koen Bostoen and Sara Pacchiarotti (BantUGent).

On Wednesday March 20, Koen Bostoen (BantUGent) was invited to give talk on “Substrate Interference in Bantu languages of Central Africa: Insights from Diachronic Phonology” at the Linguistics Department of Kyoto University (Japan).