# Anne Storch, *A Grammar of Luwo: An Anthropological Approach*

Noam Faust

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URL: https://journals.openedition.org/lla/12135

DOI: 10.4000/lla.12135

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Date of publication: December 31, 2016

Number of pages: 125-130

ISSN: 2429-2230

**Electronic reference**

Noam Faust, "Anne Storch, *A Grammar of Luwo: An Anthropological Approach*", *Linguistique et langues africaines* [Online], 2 | 2016, Online since 20 September 2023, connection on 29 September 2023. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/lla/12135; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/lla.12135

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#02

Juin 2016

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LLA

Linguistique
et Langues
Africaines

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- Additive Coordination, Comitative Adjunction, and Associative Plural in Tswana

- The Locative System in Cuwabo and Makhuwa

- Question Formation in ||Gana

- La liaison tonale en shingazidja septentrional

- Comptes-rendus / Book Reviews

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9 782359 351811

ISSN 2429-2230

ISBN 978-2-35935-181-1

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Lambert-Lucas
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Linguistique
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#02

Juin 2016

1. Additive Coordination, Comitative Adjunction, and Associative Plural in Tswana (Denis Creissels) 11

2. The Locative System in Cuwabo and Makhuwa (P30 Bantu Languages) (Rozenn Guérois) 43

3. Question Formation in ||Gana, a Khoesan Language (Rose Letsholor) 77

4. La liaison tonale en shingazidja septentrional (Cédric Patin) 95

Comptes-rendus / Book Reviews

Aliou Mohamadou, Le Verbe en seul : Formes et valeurs en pulaar du Fuuta-Tooro (2ᵉ édition) par Viktoria Apel 117

Michka Sachnine, Grammaire du yorùbá standard (Nigéria) par Nicolas Aubry 121

Anne Storch, A Grammar of Luwo: An Anthropological Approach par Noam Faust 125

Wilhelm J. G. Möhlig, Atlas of Kamba Dialects (Kenya Bantu E.55). Phonological and Lexical Comparison par Lolke J. van der Veen 131

Jacques Rongier, Dictionnaire éwé-français par Kofi Yakpo 135

Photo de couverture : Nicolas Quint : Vannier fabriquant un panier avec des nervures de rônier, village de Djifanghor, Sénégal, 2011.

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© Éditions Lambert-Lucas, 2016
ISSN 2429-2230
ISBN 978-2-35935-181-1
**Comité scientifique**

Emilio BONVINI (LLACAN, CNRS), Denis CREISSELS (DDL, Université Lyon 2), Claude HAGÈGE (EPHE), Bernd HEINE (University of Cologne), Larry HYMAN (University of California - Berkeley), Sambieni KOFFI (Université d'Abomey-Calavi), Jérémie KOUADIO (Université d'Abidjan), Friederike LÜPKE (SOAS, University of London), Gudrun MIEHE (University of Bayreuth), Maarten MOUS (Leiden University), Papa Alioune NDAO (Université Cheick Anta Diop de Dakar), Margarida PETTERS (Universidade de São Paulo), Thilo SCHADEBERG (Leiden University), John MCWHORTER (Columbia University).

**Comité de rédaction**

Nicolas AUBRY (LLACAN, INALCO), Mélanie BOURLET (LLACAN, INALCO), Pascal BOYELDIEU (LLACAN, CNRS), Gwenaëlle FABRE (LLL, Université d'Orléans), Maximilien GUÉRIN (LLACAN, Université Paris 3), Sophie MANUS (DDL, Université Lyon 2), Aliou MOHAMADOU (LLACAN, INALCO), Sylvester OSU (LLL, Université de Tours), Yvonne TREIS (LLACAN, CNRS), Marie-Claude SIMEONE-SENELLE (LLACAN, CNRS), Valentin VYDRIN (LLACAN, INALCO).

**Rédaction**

Paulette ROULON-DOKO (LLACAN, CNRS), Nicolas QUINT (LLACAN, CNRS), Loïc-Michel PERRIN (LLACAN, INALCO).

**Administration**

Jeanne ZERNER

**Directeur de la publication**

Mark VAN DE VELDE
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## Comptes-rendus

Les ouvrages sont à adresser à
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Sommaire

1. Additive Coordination, Comitative Adjunction, and Associative Plural in Tswana .................................................... 11
Denis CREISSELS

2. The Locative System in Cuwabo and Makhuwa (P30 Bantu Languages) ................................................................. 43
Rozenn GUÉROIS

3. Question Formation in Gana, a Khoesan Language ................................. 77
Rose M. LETSHOLOR

4. La liaison tonale en shingazidja septentrional ........................................ 95
Cédric PATIN

Comptes-rendus de lecture / Book Review

Aliou Mohamadou :
*Le Verbe en peul : Formes et valeurs en pulaar du Fuuta-Tooro*
(2ᵉ édition) .................................................................................... 117
par Viktoria APEL

Michka Sachnine :
*Grammaire du yorùbá standard (Nigéria)............................................ 121*
par Nicolas AUBRY

Anne Storch :
*A Grammar of Luwo: An Anthropological Approach* .................... 125
par Noam FAUST

Wilhelm J. G. Möhlig :
*Atlas of Kamba Dialects (Kenya Bantu E.55)*.
*Phonological and Lexical Comparison* ............................................ 131
par Lolke J. VAN DER VEEN

Jacques Rongier :
*Dictionnaire éwé-français* ................................................................. 135
par Kofi YAKPO
Comptes-rendus
Book reviews
*Anne STORCH, A Grammar of Luwo: An Anthropological Approach,*
*Asmsterdam and Philadelphia, Benjamins, 2015, 291 p.*

par Noam FAUST

Université Paris VIII

Luwo is a Western Nilotic language spoken in South Sudan in and around the town of Wau by around 80,000 people. It belongs to the Lwoo branch of Western Nilotic. Only one grammar of the language, Santandrea (1946), existed hitherto. Very few more focused studies have appeared. For these reasons, this new grammar of the language, written by a renowned specialist of the language family, is a highly welcome piece of work.

This grammar book bears the secondary title "An anthropological approach". The implicit claim is that the language of a given community reflects its culture. Indeed, when appropriate, the relation between the culture of the Luwo people and their language is presented. But the book remains essentially a grammar and not an anthropological report.

Linguistically, in accordance with the general emphasis on the culture of the people using the language, the book assumes a "language use" approach. The grammatical description therefore systematically avoids structural analyses and generalizations, providing instead maximally precise descriptions of the function of each construction in discourse. Accordingly, when the book does turn to ask why the language is structured the way it is, its answers are consistently of a diachronic nature. This reflects the functionalist view that language is extremely arbitrary synchronically, and that the real generalizations lie in the diachronic grammaticalization paths. Since the author is one of the few specialists working on Western Nilotic languages as a family, much comparative information is provided, especially –but not only– in cases where diachronic reconstruction is discussed.

The "anthropological approach" is also related to the organization of the book. Alongside chapters that are commonplace in grammars, such as "Phonology", "Nouns" or "Verbs", there are also chapters on "Number" (in the language in general), "Perception and Cognition" (in the culture as construed through language) and "Person and association." This novel way of organizing a grammar is another positive aspect of this work, if only for the refreshing effect that it brings to this literary linguistic genre.

The following paragraphs will briefly discuss the contents of the book. The first chapter (pp. 1-18) introduces Luwo history and language and the "anthropological approach". The second chapter (pp. 19-34) discusses the
phonology of the language. The consonantal and vocalic phonemes of Luwo are presented. All five vowels distinguish between breathy and non-breathy voice, and between long and short versions. Morphemes are largely monosyllabic (though see below). Monosyllabicity results in morpheme concatenation causing several changes to edge segments. Also discussed in this chapter are vowel harmony, vowel contact, constraints on syllable form, etc.

The next three chapters focus on morphology. Chapter 3 (pp. 35-56) discusses concepts like morpheme, phonological/grammatical word, closed classes such as prepositions, numerals, adjectives, as well as the intriguing open word class of ideophones. Luwo puts special emphasis on “smell words”: these are morphologically distinguishable from other nouns. In parallel, smell is central in Luwo culture. Chapter 4 (pp. 57-80) presents the lexical diversity of nouns, their syllabic shapes, their specific markings (many nouns carry vocalic prefixes or suffixes) and “state”<fnref n="1" /> inflection, and derivation. A special section is devoted to “culturally specified nouns” (e.g. kinship names), whose grammatical behavior is shaped by their cultural specificity. Chapter 5 (pp. 81-100) discusses noun classifiers, and is definitely one of the most important contributions of this work. It provides a classification of the nouns of the language, whether singulative, singular or plural, on the basis of their form and denotation. This is clearly an area where the author is well-informed with respect to comparative data, analyses, diachronic reconstruction and proposed grammaticalization paths. The chapter ends with a list of some 52 noun classifiers.

Bridging between the morphological chapters and the more general discussion of verbs is chapter 6 (pp. 101-114), which briefly reports on several intriguing phenomena with respect to number in Luwo. Examples are the plural inflection on adjectives denoting shape, but not on those denoting colors, and the existence of pluractional versions of state verbs, but not of verbs denoting actions. Quantifiers, numerals and “nominal aspect” (the ability of plural number to specify what kind of entity is involved) are also briefly mentioned. The equivalent of ‘three books’ denotes three individual books, whereas that of ‘three book’ denotes three new, similar books.

The next five chapters discuss the encoding of events in a broad sense. Chapter 7 (pp. 115-146), which deals with the verbal system, is another central chapter in this work. Verbal constructions are classified with respect to event structure (transitivity, causation etc.). It is shown that

<footnote n="1">1. Singular and plural nouns appear in an absolute and a modified form or “state”. The absolute state is used when the noun is not accompanied by any modifier (“complement”) in the noun phrase, while the modified state is used in all contexts where a noun does not stand alone, e.g. when it is part of a possessive noun phrase or a compound.</footnote>
contrary to previous descriptions, aspect is the central notion in the
system, while tense is largely absent. Also discussed are the two marked
moods (imperative and subjunctive) and the pronominal inflection, whose
prefixal or suffixal realization depends on the transitivity of the verb.
Chapter 8 (pp. 147-160) is called "Person and experience", and further
explores pronouns, comparing affixed and free forms and subject and
object pronominals (the latter two being nearly identical). A short and
interesting discussion presents the use of possessive nouns such as wìì=á
'my head' or cwíŋ=á 'my liver' to encode emotions: the state of liver is
indicative of the character and emotional state of the person, while that of
the head is used to denote cognitive experiences. Comparative and
superlative constructions are also discussed here. The author also
develops an interesting analysis of the inclusive/exclusive 1PL distinction
whose origins might as well be linked with some pragmatic considera-
tions, rather than with the legacy of some proto-language. Chapter 9
(pp. 161-176) on "perception and cognition" discusses how the language
reflects the way people experience perception and cognition. The text
points to semantic affinities between concepts such as knowing and
understanding and recognition and searching. Again the elaboration of
smell terms is emphasized (for example, [ŋir] 'smell of unripe beans').
Indeed, a version of 'smell' has come to denote the anticausative of
'know', i.e. 'come to know'. Chapter 10 (pp. 177-188) surveys the lin-
guistic association of two entities into combinations denoting possession,
part-whole relationship etc. Also discussed are possessive pronouns,
reflexive and reciprocal pronouns, compounding and alienability.
Speakers of Luwo can control the denotation of possessed entities by
inflecting them for state or avoiding doing so (though no minimal pair is
provided).

Chapter 11 (pp. 189-206), the fifth chapter devoted to events, relates
this topic to the following discussions on syntax and pragmatics. It
examines "word order, case and pragmatics". In it, the author puts forth
and argues for a claim, namely the fact that Luwo exhibits a split-ergative
case (split because animacy and certain word orders dispense with the
ergative marker). Ergative case, it is claimed, is "rather discourse-based,
with a case marker that is used in contexts with strong pragmatic
overtones." The emergence of this system is also discussed from a
diachronic, comparative perspective.

The three following chapters discuss syntactic topics, though always
from the angle of language use. Chapter 12 (pp. 207-222) on "location
and spatial orientation" discusses demonstratives and their usage. It
includes an interesting discussion of the interaction of special deictics and
plurality. Chapter 13 (pp. 223-238) on "clause types and constituents"
presents the basic clause and its different modifications, in the form of
adjuncts (temporal, benefactive, instrumental etc.), clause chaining (with
no subordination) and relative clauses, etc. Chapter 14 (pp. 239-246) on
"questions and negation" relates the two concepts because there seems to
be a weak taboo on answering negatively in the Luwo society. Besides a
nice discussion of avoidance strategies, there is little in the chapter
beyond illustrations of the different possible questions and negations in
Luwo.

The last two chapters establish a relationship pragmatics and socio-
linguistics. Chapter 15 (pp. 248-268) on "discourse, genre and ways of
speaking" comments on several sociolinguistic aspects of Luwo,
including conflict concealment, riddles, songs and prayers. There is a nice
discussion of gendered topics: some wild game, such as the 'monitor
lizard', are never eaten by women, and only men use the words design-
ating them as food. Chapter 16 (pp. 268-280) discusses multilingualism
and language ideology and describes the speakers' attitude towards their
language. It is asked when exactly the entirely multilingual speakers of
Luwo speak it, what they think its importance is, and what they think
makes it different from other available languages.

**Critical Evaluation.** The grammar is beyond doubt a valuable piece of
work, containing data on most domains of the language. It is clearly the
result of very serious, meticulous work, and has the awesome merit of not
confining itself to the traditional ways of writing a grammar. The usage-
based and "anthropological" approaches have led the author to arrange it
in a thought-provoking fashion.

The goals of a grammar like the one under review are at least three:
1) documenting the language as completely as possible;
2) documenting every phenomenon as thoroughly as possible; and
3) describing the mechanisms of the language. The first goal has clearly been achieved in this text. As for the second and third, there are still, in my opinion, some shortcomings. Many of the phenomena –especially in the realms of phonology and morphology– are discussed rather briefly and in an incomplete fashion. For instance, in the discussion of the form of nouns on page 58, it is said “the vowel may be short or long, but can also be a diphthong.” Can it be long and a diphthong at the same time? If not, this is important from a phonologist’s point of view. Similarly, in the discussion of the modified plural form on p. 65 it is reported that such nouns “(...) delete their plural suffix if any is present”. There are also unsuffixed plurals, created by lengthening or tonal alterations, but we are not told what the behavior of such nouns is in the modified form, only that “morphologically unmarked forms remain unchanged.” While there are other domains where more complete data are provided, I feel that at least for the Luwo morphology and phonology, which are quite spectacular from a typological point of view, this is considerably less so.
As for the third goal of describing the mechanisms of the language, I felt that the book left quite a bit to be desired. It is my opinion that beyond saying what is going on in a language, the linguist also has to say *why* things are the way they are. As mentioned above, in a few cases the author does provide the diachronic origins of certain markers, and suggests a grammaticalization path. But I personally would like to have seen more effort put into working out the synchronic reasons for things to be the way they are, that is, to understand what in the system imposes its shape. I am of the opinion that at least in some domains, languages have a certain logic of their own, and that this logic is structural. Everything cannot, I believe, be the simple result of grammaticalization.

One example that was mentioned above concerns prefixed and suffixed pronominals. The author reports that the prefixed pronominals appear on intransitive verbs, whereas suffixed pronominals appear on transitive verbs (pp. 148-153). The question is immediately raised as to the logic behind this positional allomorphy. Alas, this question is raised mainly in the head of the reader. As the grammar does comment on the general OVA order of objects and agents in transitive clauses (p. 193), the reader then has to make the connection and reconstruct by himself the following claim: the order of affixes parallels exactly the order of full arguments. A synthesis of the main syntactic patterns in Luwo might have been helpful here, in order to show that, in this language, there is only one preverbal slot which cannot be occupied by both object and subject, be they pronouns or full phrases. It is this type of explanatory dimension that I found largely absent from the grammar, for better or for worse.

All that should of course not be taken to belittle the achievement that a grammar like this one constitutes. The chapters on noun classifiers and verbs do present analyses, if only classificatory, which appropriately set the stage for more explanatory accounts. And too, it is enough of a feat to assemble a language into a coherent work, and this goal has certainly been obtained in the present case, and quite successfully so.

**Conclusion.** The recent grammar of Luwo by Anne Storch is a professional, informed grammar. For what it might lack in structural analysis, it makes up with its novel and refreshing anthropological approach, emphasizing the importance of usage and sociolinguistics, and with its knowledgeable comparative discussions and diachronic analyses. Like other work by this author, it definitely is an extremely valuable contribution to the field of Western Nilotic linguistics. As I hope to have further shown, some aspects of Western Nilotic languages render them important from a typological perspective; the book under review is thus a welcome contribution to general linguistics, too.
References

KAYE, Jonathan, Jean LOWENSTAMM & Jean-Roger VERGNAUD. 1990.
Constituent Structure and Government in Phonology. *Phonology Year-
book* 7, 193-231.

SANTANDERA, Stefano. 1946. *Grammatichetta Giur*. Verona: Missioni Africane.

SCHEER, Tobias. 2004. *A Lateral Theory of Phonology. Vol 1: What is CVCV, and why should it be?* Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.