Locative Predications in Chadic Languages : Implications for Semantic Analysis

This book shows that the grammatical systems of individual languages encode unique semantic structures. It draws on data from eight languages belonging to three branches of the Chadic language family that display locative expressions with semantic and syntactic characteristics that have not been observed or described in other languages.

This book demonstrates that the grammatical systems of individual languages encode unique semantic structures. Zygmunt Frajzyngier examines these semantic structures with particular reference to how languages convey information about the location of an entity or an event and the movements of an entity in space, drawing on data from eight typologically distinct languages that belong to three branches of the Chadic family. These languages were chosen because some display locative expressions with semantic and syntactic characteristics that have not been observed or described in other languages, most importantly in the coding of what Frajzyngier calls ''the locative domain'' in the grammatical system. The volume shows that utterances in a given language are determined by the functions encoded in the grammatical system and by where those functions are encoded; it further shows that syntactic properties and the existence of some lexical items in the language are also determined by those same functions.