A Grammar of Seenku (Mouton Grammar Library [MGL] Book 83) (Issn)

Seenku is a Western Mande language of the Samogo group spoken in southwestern Burkina Faso by approximately 17, 000 speakers. It has undergone a lot of phonological reduction, leading to a rich segmental and tonal phoneme inventory but mainly mono- and sesquisyllabic roots. The language has four contrastive levels of tone that combine to create over a dozen contours. Tone has a high functional load lexically and grammatically, permeating all aspects of grammar. Most verbs have two stem forms: a realis form and an irrealis form. The realis is derived from the irrealis by infixing a high vowel before the stem vowel, creating a diphthong. The use of a particular stem form is determined by aspect and construction type, but most other morphosyntactic meanings (e.g. progressive aspect or causative) are expressed analytically. Like most Mande languages, Seenku has an S Aux O V X word order in addition to areal clause-final negation. It displays a reduced set of post-subject "predicate markers" compared to other Mande languages, and those that are attested are variably realized only by tone changes and lengthening on the subject itself. Acknowledgements 7 Contents 9 Abbreviations 19 1 Introduction 21 2 Sketch of the grammar 31 3 Segmental phonology 40 4 Tone 97 5 Nominal morphology 148 6 Pronouns and anaphora 164 7 Compound nouns 179 8 Noun phrase structure 197 9 Ideophones and onomatopoeia 251 10 Postpositions and adverbials 269 11 Coordination 315 12 Verb stems and verbal derivation 327 13 Verbal inflection 355 14 Non-verbal predicates 391 15 Comparatives 405 16 Interrogation 413 17 Relative clauses 427 18 Conditional constructions 446 19 Complement and purposive clauses 461 20 Clause coordination and event sequencing 496 21 Information structure and discourse 511 22 Artistic adaptation of language 538 23 Texts 548 Bibliography 585 Index 591 The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only cri