GRAMMAR OF CONATIVE ANIMAL CALLS: THE CASE OF TOGO-TEŊU KAN OF DOUROU (DOGON)

• Authors: Andrason Alexander , Sagara Idrissa
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This article offers the first systematic account of the grammar of conative animal calls (CACs) in the family of Dogon languages. After analysing the meaning and form of 57 CACs in a Dogon variety spoken in the village of Dourou in Mali – the so-called Togo-Teŋu-Kan of Dourou – the authors conclude the following: the category of CACs in Togo-Teŋu Kan of Dourou largely complies with the cross-linguistic prototype of CACs in terms of its semantics, phonetics, morphology, and syntax and exhibits a considerable extent of extra-systematicity when compared to the lexical classes of the sentence grammar of this language. While these results generally corroborate the validity of the prototype of CACs posited in scholarship, the authors also propose a few, more or less fundamental, theoretical refinements and argue for a more prominent incorporation of the eco-linguistic evidence into the study of CACs.

Keywords

EN

DOGON; TOGO-TEŊU KAN; CONATIVE ANIMAL CALLS; DOGON LANGUAGES

• Publisher: Institute of Oriental Studies, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Asian and African Studies
• Year: 2024
• Volume: 33
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 48 - 96

Contributors

author

Andrason Alexander

• Centre for African Studies, University of Cape, Town Cape Town, South Africa

• https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8507-9824

author

Sagara Idrissa

• https://orcid.org/0009-0000-5465-6011

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31577/aassav.2024.33.1.03