Studies in African Languages and Cultures. Volumen 56/2022 – PDF

The issue contains articles on the structural features of African languages and proposals for new theoretical approaches in their description. Vowel changes occurring as a result of morphophonological processes in Zulu are interpreted through the prism of avoiding vowel adjacency, while the functioning of nominal phrases in sentence structure is verified on the example of a language with nominal classes (Ikyaushi). Structural features that are characteristic of African languages are reflected through the morphological analysis of proper names in Yoruba, and their pragmatic features are presented on the example of strategies for giving negative answers without using phrases with a negative connotation.

African conceptualizations of ideas are illustrated with examples of figurative semantic extensions of the term HEAD in the Dholuo language and euphemisms for talking about death in the Nzema language. Articles focusing on African literature include an analysis of the interweaving of form, content and style of Yoruba traditional poetry and Christian songs, as well as a transcript of oral tradition poems in Amharic (with translation and linguistic and literary analysis) from Stefan Strelcyn’s collection.

The authors of the articles are Africanists from European, American and African research centers and the University of Warsaw.

The publication is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International PL (CC BY-SA 4.0 PL) (full license available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode).