Gbe languages: Encyclopedia II - Gbe languages - Linguistic features

Gbe languages - Linguistic features

Gbe languages - Sounds

The following phonetic segments are attested in Gbe languages:

Notes

• When symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a voiced consonant except for the trills & approximants rows, where the symbol to the right represents a nasalised consonant.
• The voiced apico-postalveolar stop is generally written with the symbol for the alveolar voiced retroflex consonant [ɖ]. It approximates this sound, but is not as retroflex.
• The above table lists the attested phonetic segments. Some of the sounds listed here are in free variation with other sounds (e.g., r and r̃ with l and l̃). The reader is referred to the individual languages for an overview of their phoneme inventory.

No Gbe language exhibits all of the above forty-two phonetic segments. According to Capo (1991), all of them have the following twenty-three consonants in common: b m t d ɖ n k g k͡p g͡b ɲ f v s z χ ʁ r r̃ l l̃ y w.

The following vowels are found in Gbe languages:

It should be noted that none of the Gbe languages has all of the above sixteen vowel qualities. In general, each Gbe lect makes use of a subset of fourteen vowels, seven oral and seven nasalised. The vowels i ĩ u ũ e o ɛ̃ ɔ ɔ̃ a ã are attested in all Gbe languages.

Nasality plays an important role in the Gbe vowel inventory: every vowel in a Gbe language occurs in a non-nasalized and a nasalized form. Capo (1991) observes that the degree of nasality of nasal vowels is less when they occur after nasal consonants than after non-nasal ones.

Capo (1981) has argued that nasality in Gbe languages should be analysed phonemically as a feature relevant to vowels and not to consonants.^[10] This means that underlying nasal vowels are recognized, while nasal consonants are treated as merely predictable variants of their non-nasal counterparts. For example, non-syllabic nasal consonants are always followed by a nasal vowel, and syllabic nasal consonants are analysed as reduced forms of consonant-vowel syllables. This analysis is in line with reconstructions of the proto-Volta-Congo language, for which similar proposals have been made.^[11]

The Gbe languages are tonal languages. In general, they have three tone levels, High (H), Mid (M), and Low (L), of which the lower two are not phonemically contrastive. Thus, the basic tonemes of Gbe are 'High' and 'Non-High', where the High toneme may be realised as High or Rising and the Non-High toneme may be realised as Low or Mid. The tones of Gbe nouns are often affected by the consonant of the noun stem. The voicing of this consonant affects the realisation of the Non-High toneme roughly as follows: If the consonant is a voiced obstruent, the Non-High toneme is realised as Low (è-dà 'snake') and if the consonant is a voiceless obstruent or a sonorant, the Non-High toneme is realised as Mid (āmē 'person', á-fī 'mouse'). The consonants that induce tonal alternations in this way are sometimes called depressor consonants.

Gbe languages - Morphology

The basic syllable form of Gbe languages is commonly rendered (C₁)(C₂)V(C₃), meaning that there at least has to be a nucleus V, and that there are various possible configurations of consonants (C_1-3). The V position may be filled by any of the vowels or by a syllabic nasal. It is also the location of the tone. While virtually any consonant can occur in the C₁ position, there exist several restrictions on the kind of consonants that can occur in the C₂ and C₃ positions. In general, only liquid consonants may occur as C₂, while only nasals occur in the C₃ position.

Most verbs in Gbe languages have one of the basic syllable forms. Gbe nominals are generally preceded by a nominal prefix consisting of a vowel (cf. the Ewe word aɖú, 'tooth'). The quality of this vowel is restricted to the subset of non-nasal vowels. In some cases the nominal prefix is reduced to schwa or lost: the word for 'fire' is izo in Phelá, əʤo in Wací-Ewe and ʤo in Pecí-Ewe. The nominal prefix can be seen as a relic of a typical Niger-Congo noun class system.

The Gbe languages are isolating languages, and as such express many semantic features by lexical items. Of a more agglutinative nature are the commonly used periphrastic constructions. In contrast to Bantu languages, a major branch of the Niger-Congo language family, Gbe languages have very little inflectional morphology. There is for example no subject-verb agreement whatsoever in Gbe, no gender agreement, and no inflection of nouns for number. The Gbe languages make extensive use of a rich system of tense/aspect markers.

Reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word, or part of it, is repeated. The Gbe languages, like most other Kwa languages, make extensive use of reduplication in the formation of new words, especially in deriving nouns, adjectives and adverbs from verbs. Thus in Ewe, the verb lá̃, 'to cut', is nominalised by reduplication, yielding lãlá̃, 'the act of cutting'. Triplication is used to intensify the meaning of adjectives and adverbs, e.g. Ewe ko 'only' > kokooko 'only, only, only'.

Gbe languages - Syntax

The basic word order of Gbe clauses is generally Subject Verb Object, except in the imperfective tense and some related constructions. The Gbe languages, notably Ewe, Fon and Anlo, played a role in the genesis of several Caribbean creole languages — Haitian Creole for example is classifiable as having a French vocabulary with the syntax of a Gbe language.^[12]

The Gbe languages do not lend much support to the traditional distinction between tense and aspect. The only tense that is expressed by a simple morphological marker in Gbe languages is the future tense. The future marker is ná or a, as can be seen from the examples below. Other tenses are arrived at by means of special time adverbs or by inference from the context, and this is where the tense/aspect distinction becomes blurred. For example, what is sometimes referred to as perfective aspect in Gbe blends with the notion of past tense since it expresses an event with a definite endpoint, located in the past (see example sentences below).

• ŋútsu á a ɸlè xéxí   (man DET FUT buy umbrella)   the man will buy an umbrella   (Ewegbe, future marker)
• ŋútsu á ɸlè xéxí   (man DET buy:PERF umbrella)   the man bought an umbrella   (Ewegbe, perfective)

Focus, which is used to draw attention to a particular part of the utterance, to signify contrast or to emphasize something, is expressed in Gbe languages by leftward movement of the focused element and by way of a focus marker wɛ́ (Gungbe, Fongbe), yé (Gengbe) or é (Ewegbe), suffixed to the focused element.

• àxwé yé Kòfí tù   (house FOC Kofi build:PERF)   Kofi built A HOUSE   (Gengbe, focus)

Questions can be constructed in various ways in Gbe languages. A simple declarative sentence can be turned into an interrogative utterance by the use of the question marker à at the end of the sentence. Another way of forming questions is by using question words. These so-called question word questions are much akin to focus constructions in Gbe. The question word is found at the beginning of the sentence, as is the focus marker. The close relationship to focus is also clear from the fact that in Gbe, a sentence cannot contain a question word and a focused element simultaneously.

• Afua de Gɛ à?   (Afua reach:PERF Gɛ QUESTION)   Did Afua go to Accra?   (Ewegbe, question)
• étɛ́ Sɛ́ná xìá?   (what Sena read:PERF)   What did Sena read? (Gungbe, question word question)

Topicalization, the signalling of the subject that is being talked about, is achieved in Gbe languages by the move of the topicalized element to the beginning of the sentence. In some Gbe languages, a topic marker is suffixed to the topicalized element. In other Gbe languages the topic has to be definite. A topicalized element precedes the focused element in a sentence containing both.

• ...ɖɔ̀ dàn ɔ́, Kòfí wɛ̀ hùì   (that snake DET Kofi FOC kill:PERF-it)   ...that the snake, KOFI killed it   (Fongbe, topic)

Negation is expressed in various ways in the Gbe languages. In general, three methods of negation can be distinguished: Languages like Gungbe express negation by a preverbal marker má; Fongbe-type languages express negation either like Gungbe, or with a sentence-final marker ã; and languages like Ewegbe require both the preverbal marker mé and a sentence-final marker o.

Gbe languages share an areal feature found in many languages of the Volta basin, the serial verb construction. This means that two or more verbs can be juxtaposed in one clause, sharing the same subject, lacking conjunctive markings, resulting in a meaning that expresses the consecutive or simultaneous aspect of the actions of the verbs.

• Kofí trɔ dzo kpoo   (Kofi turn:PERF leave:PERF quietly)   Kofi turned and left quietly   (Ewegbe, serial verb construction)

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Linguistic features", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki