Caught in the middle
Songhay bidirectional case-marker *nà and its likely Mande origin
The relationship between the Songhay and Mande language families has fascinated West Africanists. The typological
similarities run deep, but the respective lexicons are noncognate. I focus here on a typological rarity, a bidirectional case
marker (BCM), namely Proto-Songhay *nà and its descendants, and argue that it was most likely borrowed from Mande as part of the
adoption by Songhay of the equally typologically rare Mande-type S(‑infl)‑O‑V‑X syntax, which reduces to S‑O‑V‑X when there is no
post-subject inflectional morpheme (predicative marker). Apparently Songhay had little choice but to borrow the morpheme on the
grounds that it did not previously possess the S(‑infl)‑O‑V‑X construction of which it is a key component, especially since a
buffer between S and O prevents real-time mis-parsing of two adjacent NPs as possessor-possessum. The medial (‘caught in the
middle’) position of the morpheme in the S‑BCM‑O sequence favored the borrowing, in spite of its abstract relational function
which in some theoretical models should block borrowing.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Songhay family
- 1.2Mande family
- 2.Bidirectional case markers (BCMs) in Songhay
- 3.Absence of good Songhay-internal etyma for *nà
- 3.1*nàŋ ‘leave’
- 3.2Identificational and nonsubject-focalizing *nôn
- 4.Songhay *nà as a borrowing from Mande
- 4.1Proto-west/northwest Mande *nà
- 4.2Possible cognates in west/central and east Mande
- 4.3Inverting the direction of borrowing
- 5.Borrowing mechanics
- 6.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
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