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HU Credits:
2
Degree/Cycle:
1st degree (Bachelor)
Responsible Department:
Linguistics
Semester:
2nd Semester
Teaching Languages:
English
Campus:
Mt. Scopus
Course/Module Coordinator:
Anna Veselovsky
Coordinator Office Hours:
Teaching Staff:
Ms. Anna Veselovsky
Course/Module description:
This language course spans three semesters. The focus of the course is two-fold: on the one hand, the participants will learn how to work with various materials collected during field work and get familiarized with methods of describing an understudied language, as well as contribute to the ongoing project dedicated to the documentation and description of this language.
Course/Module aims:
Ruuli is a Great lakes Bantu language of the Niger-Congo phylum spoke in Uganda. It is the native language of the Baruuli and Banyara people of central Uganda. It is a minority language spoken by about 180,000 people. The materials to be used in the course originate from an ongoing documentation project and encompass a corpus of more than 100,000 words and a lexicon. In the course of the seminar the students will get familiarized with various structural aspects of this language (phonology, tone, morphology, syntax, and lexicon), and will have the opportunity to contribute to its description by investigating individual aspects of this language.
The second theme of this course are the Bantu languages in general. It is a large family of languages (between 440 and 680) spoken by the Bantu peoples throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. As part of the Southern Bantoid group, they are part of the Benue-Congo language family, which in turn is part of the large Niger-Congo phylum. Bantu languages are largely spoken east and south of present-day Cameroon, throughout Central Africa, Southeast Africa and Southern Africa. Many Bantu languages have been documented and extensive descriptions exist for some of them. Typologically, these languages are famous for their extensive gender/noun class systems, extensive productive valency-changing morphology, an intimate integration of information structure and clause syntax. During the course of the seminar the students will be familiarized with the diversity and genealogical classification of these group of languages, with its major typological characteristics, as well as with recurrent research topics. The existing descriptions of other Bantu languages will support and guide the study of Ruuli.
The course offers the possibility to obtain a first-hand experience in collaboration on an on-going language documentation and description project, as well as will ensure that the participants gain an intimate familiarity with the structure of the Bantu languages.
Learning outcomes - On successful completion of this module, students should be able to:
On successful completion of this module, students should be able to outline the major typological characteristics of the Bantu languages and identify the respective structures in Ruuli and other languages. The participants will be able to collect relevant examples on any aspects of Bantu grammar from annotated and not annotated corpora, organize and summarize the findings and interpret them in the light of what is known about the Bantu languages and what is expected from the typological point of view. The participants will learn to plan a corpus-based study on individual aspects of Ruuli grammar, will prepare, design and complete a number of such studies, will be able to enrich the available corpus with further linguistic annotations and summarize and evaluate them.
Attendance requirements(%):
85
Teaching arrangement and method of instruction:
Course/Module Content:
1st semester
Class 1: Introduction, the Bantu languages: a bird's eye view; Ruuli and its speakers
Class 2: Classifications of the Bantu languages: History, methods, challenges
Class 3: Ruuli: resources and tools
Class 4: Ruuli: orthography and phonology basics
Class 5: Bantu nominal morphology; the augment
Class 6: Ruuli nominal morphology and morphophonology (1)
Class 7: Ruuli nominal morphology and morphophonology (2)
Class 8: Attributive possession in Ruuli and Bantu
Class 9: Ruuli and Bantu demonstratives
Class 10: Adjectives in Ruuli; agreement within a noun phrase
Class 11: Agreement within a noun phrase
Class 12: Noun phrase in Bantu and Ruuli: a summary
Class 13: Locatives in Ruuli and Bantu (1)
Class 14: Locatives in Ruuli and Bantu (2)
2nd semester
Class 1: Verbal morphology in Bantu: major categories
Class 2: Verbal agreement morphology in Ruuli
Class 3: Object agreement in Bantu and Ruuli
Class 4: TAM in Bantu
Class 5: TAM in Ruuli (1): tense
Class 6: TAM in Ruuli (2): aspect
Class 7: TAM in Ruuli (3): mood
Class 8: Phasal polarity and the persistive; negation
Class 9: The syntax, semantics and morphology of valency changing operations (1): the passive
Class 10: The syntax, semantics and morphology of valency changing operations (2): the applicative
Class 11: The syntax, semantics and morphology of valency changing operations (3): the causative
Class 12: The syntax, semantics and morphology of valency changing operations (4): the reflexive
Class 13: Infinitives in Bantu and Ruuli
Class 14: Verbal syntax and morphology in Ruuli: a summary and way forward
3rd semester
The third semester will cover such topics as dialectal variation, word formation, lexicosemantics and further syntactic topics (information structure and constituent order, relative clauses, etc.). The choice of the topics will be guided by the participants' interest and suitability of individual topics for research publications.
Required Reading:
Nurse, Derek and Philippson, Gérard. 2003. The Bantu languages. London: Routledge.
Additional Reading Material:
Multiple articles on individual aspects of Bantu languages will be provided during the course.
Course/Module evaluation:
End of year written/oral examination 0 %
Presentation 10 %
Participation in Tutorials 0 %
Project work 50 %
Assignments 20 %
Reports 20 %
Research project 0 %
Quizzes 0 %
Other 0 %
Additional information:
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