Il s’agit d’une description grammaticale du ɓaka, une langue oubanguienne (Niger-Congo). L’analyse se fonde sur un corpus recueilli sur le terrain, dans la région de l’Est-Cameroun (département du Haut-Nyong). Le corpus représente 1h 36mn de paroles spontanées qui ont été traitées sous Toolbox, Elan et Praat puis analysées dans une perspective structurale fonctionnaliste. La thèse comprend trois parties. La première regroupe une introduction et l’analyse phonologique. La seconde partie est consacrée à l’établissement des catégories grammaticales. Le ɓaka étant une langue à faible morphologie, c’est à partir de critères syntaxiques que quinze catégories ont été identifiées : Verbe, Nom, Nom relationnel, Pronom personnel, Pronom, Adjectif, Adverbe, Numéral, Prédicatif, Préposition, Subordinatif, Coordinatif, Interjection, Onomatopée et Modalité. Je présente, pour chaque catégorie définie, une étude des formes et de son fonctionnement. La troisième partie qui porte sur la syntaxe présente le syntagme nominal, le syntagme verbal et la prédication non verbale qui sont les éléments fondamentaux de la structuration de cette langue. La prédication non verbale combine le recours à des prédicatifs non verbaux et à la construction d’énoncé sans prédicatif dédié fondée sur la juxtaposition de deux éléments dont j’analyse les caractéristiques. J’aborde ensuite l’énoncé complexe, et traite en particulier des connecteurs entre propositions que sont les coordinatifs et les subordinatifs, puis des procédés de topicalisation et de focalisation qui manifestent la hiérarchie dans l’énoncé. Une bibliographie et une annexe présentant la transcription de trois textes du corpus terminent ce travail. / Ɓaka is an Ubangian language of the Niger-Congo language family. The grammatical description is based on a text corpus that was collected during fieldwork in the department of Haut Nyong in the East Province of Cameroon. The corpus consists of recordings (1h and 36 min) of spontaneous speech, which were annotated in Toolbox, Elan and Praat and then analyzed from a structuralist-functionalist perspective. The thesis is divided into three parts. Part 1 contains the introduction and the phonological analysis. Part 2 is dedicated to defining the word classes. As Ɓaka is a language with little morphology, the following 15 word classes were identified through syntactic criteria: verb, noun, relational noun, personal pronoun, pronoun, adjective, adverb, numeral, predicator, preposition, subordinator, coordinator, interjection, onomatopoeia and modal. For each of these defined word classes, a study of their forms and functions is presented. Part 3 deals with the syntax of Ɓaka, more precisely with the noun phrase, the verb phrase and non-verbal predication, which are the fundamental structuring units of this language. Non-verbal predication encompasses both the use of non-verbal predicators as well as constructions that contain no dedicated predicators and are based on two juxtaposed elements, whose characteristic features are analyzed in detail. Part 3 is also concerned with complex sentences. It examines coordinating and subordinating connectors as well as topicalization and focalization strategies, which reflect hierarchical relations in the sentence. The thesis concludes with a bibliography and an appendix containing three transcribed texts from the corpus.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Texas at Arlington, 2008.

This thesis presents a detailed description and analysis of several topics in the grammar of Bago, a Gur language spoken in the central-eastern region of Togo. It covers areas in the phonology, syntax, and semantics of the language. The first chapter provides background information about the history and culture of the Bago people prior to giving an overview of the geographical location and classification of the language, previous literature, data collection, and the methodology used in this thesis. The second chapter describes the sound system and syllable structure of the language. It also analyzes the vowel harmony and tonal patterns in Bago nouns and verbs. Chapter three gives a brief overview of the grammar of Bago, and chapter four describes number suffixes, semantics and phonological processes observed in the five classes of nouns. The fifth chapter is concerned with personal pronouns, as well as the question of how to encode reflexivity and reciprocity. A discussion of (in)definiteness encoding is presented in chapter six, which also contains a description of the demonstrative morphemes in the language. Chapter seven deals with nominal modification expressed in the language by means of adjectival roots, predicative nominals, and intransitive verbs. In chapter eight, we investigate the distribution of the copular verbs and the distinction between dynamic and stative verbs. A preliminary description and analysis of the factative and the imperfective aspects are presented in chapter nine, while the following chapter aims to describe modality and conditionality. Chapter eleven is concerned with clausal and constituent negation. The final chapter examines lexical, morphological, and syntactic causative constructions in Bago.

Gujjolaay Eegimaa (G.E.), an Atlantic language of the Niger-Congo phylum spoken in the Basse-Casamance area in Senegal, exhibits a system of nominal classification known as a "gender/ noun class system". In this type of nominal classification system which is prevalent in Niger-Congo languages, there is controversy as to whether the obligatory classification of all nouns into a finite number of classes has semantic motivations. In addition to the disputed issue of the semantic basis of the nominal classification, the formal criteria for assigning nouns into classes are also disputed in Joola languages and in G.E. In this PhD thesis, I propose an investigation of the formal and semantic properties of the nominal classification system of Gujjolaay Eegimaa (G.E). Based on cross-linguistic and language-specific research, I propose formal criteria whose application led to the discovery of fifteen noun classes in G.E. Here, I argue that the G.E. noun class system has semantic motivations. I show that some nouns in this language may be classified or categorized on the basis of shared properties as stipulated in the classical theory of categorization. However, most of the classification of the G.E. nouns is based on prototypicality and extension of such prototypes by family resemblance, chaining process, metaphor and metonymy, as argued in the prototype theory from cognitive semantics. The parameters of categorization that fruitfully account for the semantic basis of the G.E. nominal classification system are both universal and cultural-specific. Primary data constitutes the material used in this research and include lexical (including loanwords), textual as well as experimental data using picture stimuli. The collected data comprise different types of communicative events recorded in audio and video formats and also in written format through participant observation.

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