pp. 395-398 | 10.1353/anl.2010.0018
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
There is almost no descriptive linguistic work available on Kagulu, a language of eastern Tanzania (also referred to as Kaguru or Chikagulu). A grammar by Last (1886) is generally unreliable, and only very brief descriptions or mention of the language are provided by Kadima (1969), Kamba Muzenga (1981), and Tucker and Bryan (1957). Thus, this basic grammar is an important contribution not only to our knowledge of this language, but to the ever-growing list of descriptions of Bantu languages. It is a revised and expanded version of the author's doctoral dissertation (University of Göteborg, Sweden). The description is straightforward and clearly written.
The grammar is organized into seven chapters, plus a detailed table of contents, a word list, and a subject index. The introductory chapter provides an overview of the author's approach to the data and background on the people and their language. Chapter 2 briefly outlines Kagulu phonology and morphophonology. Chapters 3 and 4, the meat of the grammar, are devoted to a description of the morphology. Chapter 3 describes nominal morphology and noun phrase structure, and chapter 4, verbal morphology. Chapter 5 is a very brief discussion of uninflected parts of speech. Chapter 6 addresses the syntax. Chapter 7 provides closing remarks. Following the descriptive chapters, there are four glossed and translated texts, a Kagulu-English word list, a list of references, and a brief subject index.
The main focus of the grammar is the morphology. Consequently, the phonology is only briefly described, a mere eleven pages. Nevertheless, this is sufficient to give an overview of key points, though detail is often lacking. Two interesting features of the phonology are the presence in Kagulu of voiceless nasals and the very restricted use of tone. The author labels this a pitch accent system, but does not describe how it works or provide tone marking. Kagulu also appears to have phonemic stress, of which several examples are given. However, stress, like tone, is unmarked. Given its apparent phonemic nature, it would have been useful if stress had been marked, at least in the word list.
The heart of the grammar is the two main chapters on noun and verb morphology, together comprising one-third of the book. In her description, Petzell adopts a form-to-function approach, stemming from Basic Linguistic Theory, a theory widely used in language description (see Dryer 2001). The rationale here is to describe each language in its own terms and not to impose Western linguistic notions on the data.
The long chapter on nominal morphology contains a general description of the noun class system and agreement, including a discussion of the function of the initial vowel (or preprefix or augment), which appears to determine the definiteness or specificity of the noun. Examples of each noun class are provided to illustrate their use. Here it would have been useful to see whether there were any patterns in stress placement across the classes. For example, do all class fifteen infinitives have initial stress? The second half of the chapter describes noun phrase constituents, including discussion of adjectives, demonstratives, numbers, possessives, and quantifiers. In this area, Kagulu is much like other Bantu languages.
Verbal morphology is described and analyzed in chapter 4. Two-thirds of the chapter is devoted to a discussion of inflectional morphology: person and number, tense-aspect-modality, and negation. Petzell adopts a holistic approach in the description of tense-aspect marking, identifying the uses of a construction as a whole without ascribing specific meaning to particular markers. The tense-aspect system is not as complex as in some Bantu languages, but nevertheless it raises interesting issues of analysis. One issue is the description and analysis of what are labeled the past/imperfective (ha + subject marker + stem + a) and the past/perfective (subject marker + stem + a). Examples of the past/perfective are presented in the description translated with the English perfect, though in the texts this form is generally...
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