Book
Proto-Niger-Congo. Personal Pronouns
Москва, 2013, 608 p.
The monograph aims at presenting a detailed comparative analysis of person marking systems in the languages of Sub-Saharan Africa belonging to the postulated Niger-Congo macrofamily, which comprises over 1500 languages. The comparison of paradigmatic morphological systems such as the person marking may provide valuable evidence for affirming distant relationship hypotheses and genetic classifications. The reconstructed paradigm should satisfy two criteria: be as economical and as uncontroversial as possible. The idea of the book, however, is not only to reconstruct the general appearance of the morphemes which used to mark person / number in Proto-Niger-Congo, but also to show the function and the place of person marking in the proto-languages and to trace the ways of its transformation from Proto-Niger-Congo to the contemporary languages of the family. Finally, the research seeks to demonstrate clear-cut boundaries of Niger-Congo showing that there are languages in Sub-Saharan Africa which by no means demonstrate person marking systems traceable to Proto-Niger-Congo. The book is the first tentative analysis and comparison of over 650 Niger-Congo languages and a reconstruction of the proto-language of the largest African language family. The monograph will be useful for experts in African languages, comparative-historical and typological linguistics, general linguists and all those interested in the history of language.
Content
РУССКАЯ ВЕРСИЯ: Нигеро-конголезский праязык : личные местоимения