Books by corentin bourdeau
In Wolof (Niger-Congo, North Atlantic), information structure is mainly expressed by means of spe... more In Wolof (Niger-Congo, North Atlantic), information structure is mainly expressed by means of specific constructions, which are often assumed to be integrated into the verbal system of the language and to constitute conjugation paradigms. In this dissertation, the author explores the semantics and the grammatical structures of those constructions, or more precisely, of the four constructions that have been associated with the expression of focus in the literature. It appears, after all, that not all the constructions at issue are about focus, since one of them is used to make verum-assertions while another, in fact, encodes the absence of information hierarchy within the proposition. At the morphosyntactic level, the author describes Wolof as a language without conjugations, and more generally, with poor inflectional morphology. What the author proposes instead, is an elegant but radically simplified grammar of Wolof, which exclusively consists of syntactic structures derivable from two fundamental grammatical rules: verb / predicate raising and clitic attraction.
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Books by corentin bourdeau