A Grammar Of Akoose: A Northwest Bantu Language (sil International And The University Of Texas At Arlington Publications In Linguistics, 143) [Paperback]

Akoose is the language spoken by approximately 100,000 Bakoosi people who live in southwest Cameroon. The language is located near the northwestern range of narrow-Bantu languages.

Grammar of Akoose: A northwest Bantu language, by Robert Hedinger describes the grammatical structure of Akoose, an SVO language. It has a typical noun-class concord system with agreement in noun class within the noun phrase and subject-verb agreement marked on the verb.The book will appeal to a local audience interested in their own language as well as to linguists with an interest in African languages.

Topics covered

• Phonology sketch.
• Nouns, including the typical Bantu noun class system.
• Noun phrase, including various noun phrase types, noun modifiers--both those that agree with the head noun and those not manifesting any agreement--associative noun phrase and the semantic relations expressed.
• Verbs, with derivational suffixes and their effect on valence, tense, aspect, mood and negation. All verb forms are illustrated with paradigms, showing a complex verbal system.
• Verb phrase, including auxiliary verbs, which have an interesting range of functions.
• Clause types and their constituents.
• Sentence modifications, such as questions, topicalization and relative clauses.
• Complex sentences: reported speech, indirect questions and other clause combinations.
• Negation: clausal, non-clausal and lexical.
• Appendices, giving lists of ideophones, exclamations, comparative wordlists, loanwords and an interlinerized text.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction and Outline of Phonology
2. The Noun
   • Classes
   • Genders
   • Agreement or noun class concord
   • Internal structure
   • Diminutive
   • Negative
   • Compound
3. The Noun Phrase
   • Introduction
   • Structure