bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Individual Differences in Processing of Negative Operators
Authors: Dwivedi Veena D.
Published: May 2020

This chapter argues that a focus on individual differences in sentence processing is key in understanding how bilinguals process negation and negative dependencies. That is, bilinguals, like monolinguals, have been shown to exhibit considerable variation in behavioral and neural responses to sentence perception. It draws on recent findings in the author’s lab, and elsewhere, to show that individual differences in interpretation for sentences exhibiting scope ambiguity can account for disparate results (across typologically different languages, such as Korean and English) regarding negation in monolinguals. Moreover, the chapter shows how the model of sentence processing as ‘Heuristic first, algorithmic second’ accounts for neural signatures associated with negative sentences. Finally, heuristic vs. algorithmic processing is linked to appropriate neural responses and theories of bilingual sentence perception, and implications regarding the study of bilingual neural architecture are discussed.
The Neurobiology of Lexical and Sentential Negation
Authors: Papeo Liuba , de Vega Manuel
Published: May 2020

Is negation inherently harder than affirmation? How does negation change the neural representation of a word meaning? Recent studies considering pragmatic aspects of language, largely neglected in early studies on negation, have challenged the view that negation involves an extra processing stage to modify, or recode, an affirmative representation initially activated. In consequence, researchers have sought to determine the earliest effects of negation on the neural activity associated with language understanding. Behavioral, neuroimaging, and electrophysiological research have highlighted three circumstances. First, negation changes the neural representation of a word meaning from the earliest stages of word processing. Second, negation reduces or abolishes the activity in brain areas representing the word in the scope of negation. Third, the brain network for response inhibition is recruited during processing negation. Composing these results into a unitary framework, a neurobiological model of negation is proposed that integrates the neurophysiological mechanisms of lexical-semantic processing and inhibition.
The Expression of Negation in Sign Languages
Authors: Quer Josep
Published: May 2020

Negation systems in sign languages have been shown to display the core grammatical properties attested for natural language negation. Negative manual signs realize clausal negation in much the same way as in spoken languages. However, the visual-gestural modality affords the possibility to encode negative marking non-manually, and sign languages vary as to whether such markers can convey negation on their own or not. Negative concord can be argued to exist between manual and non-negative markers of negation, but we also find cases of negative concord among manual signs. Negation interacts in interesting ways with other grammatical categories, and it can be encoded in irregular and affixal forms that still have sentential scope. At the same time, negation is attested in lexical morphology leading to forms that do not express sentential negation.
Intermediary Liability in Africa: Looking Back, Moving Forward?
Authors: Zingales Nicolo
Published: May 2020

This chapter reviews key intermediary liability developments in the African region to document a trend of progressive diffusion of intermediary liability protections. At the same time, the chapter highlights a parallel trend of increasing pressure on intermediaries to fulfil broad and open-ended public policy mandates. This generates a serious risk of compromising the value of intermediary protections, creating an uncertain terrain for a wide range of actors, and potentially affecting both technological progress and the creation of local content in one of the most underdeveloped regions of the world. To avert those consequences, this chapter reflects on the potential offered by the African Union in driving harmonization in the field, highlighting the advantages of the first and arguably most sophisticated model of intermediary protections in the region: the South African Electronic Communications Act.
The Liability of Australian Online Intermediaries
Authors: Pappalardo Kylie , Suzor Nicolas
Published: May 2020

This chapter provides a comprehensive review of the current state of Australian online intermediary liability law across different doctrines. Different doctrines in Australian law employ a range of different tests for determining when an actor will be liable for the actions of a third party. So far, these primarily include cases brought under the laws of defamation, racial vilification, misleading and deceptive conduct, contempt of court, and copyright. These bodies of law are conceptually different and derive from different historical contexts, and the courts have generally applied them in isolation. The chapter shows that the basis on which third parties are liable for the actions of individuals online is confusing and, viewed as a whole, largely incoherent. The chapter shows how the principle limiting devices of liability across all of these schemes—intention, passivity, and knowledge—are ineffective in articulating a clear distinction for circumstances in which intermediaries will not be held liable. The result is a great deal of uncertainty. It is argued here that intermediary liability law should develop by focusing on the concept of responsibility, and that existing principles in tort jurisprudence and theory can help to guide and unify the different standards for liability.
From Liability Trap to the World’s Safest Harbour: Lessons from China, India, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, and Malaysia
Authors: Park Kyung-Sin
Published: May 2020

This chapter compares the intermediary liability rules of six major Asian countries and highlights how there seems to be confusion on their nature, although the commentators of all countries describe their respective rules as ‘safe harbours’ resembling section 512 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The chapter describes how China and South Korea inadvertently created a liability-imposing rule instead of a liability-exempting rule. Further, the chapter reviews India and Japan’s statutes that set out liability-exempting regimes closely resembling the EU e-Commerce Directive. India’s 2011 Intermediary Guidelines generate a strong cloud of obligations on intermediaries that threatens to convert the whole system into a liability-imposing one. However, that threat had an impact on the jurisprudence with the 2013 Shreya Singhal decision making the Indian system one of the world’s safest harbours. This chapter further discusses the importance of distinguishing between a liability-imposing rule and a liability-exempting one in the light of other Asian examples. Indonesia’s safe harbour draft regulation announced in December 2016 seems to move towards the dangerous model of both China and South Korea. Malaysia’s copyright notice and takedown appears to follow the US model closely but has a structure that allows the same misunderstanding made by South Korean regulators.
Harmonizing Intermediary Copyright Liability in the EU: A Summary
Authors: Angelopoulos Christina
Published: May 2020

This chapter reviews the lessons of European tort law for intermediary liability in copyright in order to plot a path towards the European harmonization of the area. In the absence of a complete EU framework for intermediary accessory copyright liability, Member States currently rely on home-grown solutions. This chapter examines three examples of such solutions: those of the UK, France, and Germany. The selected national jurisdictions represent three major tort law traditions of Europe. The analysis reveals three cross-jurisdictional approaches to intermediary liability in copyright: intra-copyright solutions, tort-based solutions, and injunction-based solutions. On the basis of these options, and taking into account the lessons of existing projects on the harmonization of European tort law, as well as the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union, the chapter proposes a framework for European intermediary liability in copyright. As the chapter explains, this is informed by existing EU and national law on the copyright, tort, and fundamental rights level.
Intermediary Liability and Online Trade Mark Infringement: Emerging International Common Approaches
Authors: Mostert Frederick
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses intermediary liability for trade mark infringement from an international perspective. Given that the lack of uniform international guidelines has made tackling counterfeits in a borderless digital environment even more challenging, this chapter shows that there are emerging intermediary liability common approaches at the international level for online trade mark infringement. The chapter outlines three common tenets that can be distilled into a transnational principle of intermediary liability, including knowledge-and-takedown obligations and availability of blocking injunctions. Further, this chapter discusses how this emerging common international principle is then coupled by a ius gentium of voluntary measures that results from voluntary cooperation between online intermediaries and rightholders to curb infringement. However, it is important to strike a fair balance with other fundamental rights, such as freedom of expression, information and lawful competition.
Intermediary Liability and Trade Mark Infringement: A Common Law Perspective
Authors: Arnold Richard
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses UK case law in the domain of intermediary liability and trade mark infringement, while situating this common law perspective within EU trade mark law, the e-Commerce Directive, and the Enforcement Directive. The chapter first describes liability stemming from legal principles which are not particular to intermediaries, including primary and accessory liability of online intermediaries for trade mark infringement. Later, the chapter reviews liability depending on the application of principles which are specific to intermediaries, the intermediary liability proper. In this context, the chapter looks into injunctions against intermediaries whose services are used to infringe trade marks that are made available in national jurisdictions under the implementation of Article 11 of the Enforcement Directive. Although other kinds of injunctions against intermediaries are available, the chapter focuses on website-blocking injunctions, which have been recently ported from the copyright domain, where they have been more traditionally deployed, to the trade mark domain.
Notice-and-Notice-Plus: A Canadian Perspective Beyond the Liability and Immunity Divide
Authors: Laidlaw Emily
Published: May 2020

This chapters discusses liability of online intermediaries for defamation, hate speech, and other speech-related infringements in Canada and other common law jurisdictions. After an introduction to the common law and statutory legal context, this chapter puts forward a reform proposal for online defamation. In doing so, first the chapter outlines the Notice-and-Notice-Plus (NN+) model, identifying the legal context for the proposal and sketching its main features. Secondly, this chapter explores the viability of deploying this model to other kinds of harmful speech, including fake news, terrorist content, and hate speech. All these typologies of harmful speech are discussed in detail in order to assess the optimal intermediary liability model for their regulation online.
Blocking Orders: Assessing Tensions with Human Rights
Authors: Geiger Christophe , Izyumenko Elena
Published: May 2020

In the past few years, the practice of enforcing intellectual property by ordering internet access providers to block infringing websites has been rapidly growing, especially in Europe. European Courts, such as the CJEU and ECtHR, advance several factors to inform—from the perspective of different fundamental rights—the website-blocking practices for copyright enforcement in Europe. This chapter provides an overview of these factors, starting with the freedom of expression framework for website blocking and the rather revolutionary, at least for the European judiciary, concept of user rights that has being construed under it. It then proceeds to discuss the limits of intermediaries’ involvement in digital enforcement dictated by the EU-specific freedom to conduct a business. The required efficacy of the blocking resulting from the human right to property framework for intellectual property is also examined. Potential effects on the website-blocking practices of the recent EU copyright reform are then discussed before concluding.
A Theoretical Taxonomy of Intermediary Liability
Authors: Riordan Jaani
Published: May 2020

This chapter aims to provide a taxonomy of the different types of liability which may be imposed upon internet intermediaries, and a theoretical framework for talking about problems of liability. This taxonomy is intended to situate each of these areas within an overall framework for analysing legal responsibility and the different ways in which it may be imposed upon facilitators of harm. First, this chapter begins by considering what is meant by ‘liability’ and identifying the different forms that it may take, consistently with widespread assumptions about moral agency and individual responsibility. Secondly, this chapter analyses how liability may be attributed or imputed for the acts and omissions of others, noting a distinction between two models of responsibility which may be termed ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ (or accessory) liability. Thirdly, this chapter considers the functions and policy justifications for imposing liability onto intermediaries for the acts or omissions of others. Finally, this chapter provides an overview of the main kinds of wrongdoing for which intermediaries may, in principle, be liable, by reference to English and EU law, several of which are discussed in more detail elsewhere in this work.
Internet Jurisdiction and Intermediary Liability
Authors: Svantesson Dan Jerker B.
Published: May 2020

This chapter seeks to set the scene and make some proposals for how we may make progress in the field of internet jurisdiction. For this purpose, the chapter will focus on three examples where the matter of internet jurisdiction is a major concern for internet intermediaries. The first relates to the validity of the terms of service that internet intermediaries typically impose on their users, and which typically contain important provisions regarding jurisdiction and applicable law. The second example relates to situations in which law enforcement agencies seek access to user data held by internet intermediaries. Such situations give rise to important matters of jurisdiction, not only where the requesting law enforcement agency and the internet intermediary are based in different countries, but may also—as was illustrated in the well-known Microsoft Warrant case—give rise to such issues where the requested data is stored outside the country in which both the law enforcement agency and the internet intermediary are based. The third example relates to the matter of geographical scope where an internet intermediary is required to remove, block, take down, delist, de-index, or de-reference content.
An Overview of the United States’ Section 230 Internet Immunity
Authors: Goldman Eric
Published: May 2020

This chapter provides an overview of online intermediaries’ immunities in the United States. In particular, it reviews 47 USC § 230, which says that websites and other online services are not liable for third party content. The chapter focuses on how this legal policy is simple and elegant, but is hardly intuitive, and it has had extraordinary consequences for the internet and our society. After reviewing pre-section 230 law and case law, the chapter discusses the moderator’s dilemma and the introduction of section 230 in the United States. It then describes section 230’s protections for the defendant, statutory exclusions, and implications for innovation, highlighting the positive externalities of section 230 and critical views of section 230’s arrangement. Finally, the chapter discusses how section 230 compares to some foreign counterparts.
Food and Cognition
Authors: Herman Bernard L.
Published: May 2020

Through the lens of Henry Norwood’s A Voyage to Virginia, a harrowing account of a royalist exile’s 1649–1650 journey from Oliver Cromwell’s England to British America, this chapter explores the interplay of material culture and cognition. The coevolution of things and people, however, is not just about “how” we know and evolve with and through things but also about aesthetics and affect in everyday life. Norwood punctuates the account of his journey with recitations of the foods he encountered, their preparations, and their consumption, and through that framing device reveals a deeper engagement with civil discourse. Recuperating Norwood’s natural, cultural, and culinary contexts reveals social ecologies that range from how individuals and communities addressed factors as diverse as climate change, ennobled governance, and global sensus communis through objects as plain as a mussel shell spoon, a well-ordered table, or a pot of oyster and turkey stew.
Ebony and Ivory
Authors: Byrd Dana E.
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines the American Civil War history of the piano to shed light on the enormous socioeconomic changes that occurred on the plantation during this tumultuous period. The war sent people and objects in motion. Union soldiers were sent into battle as far away as New Orleans, Louisiana, and Tampa, Florida, and they occupied the South for more than fifteen years after the war began in 1861. Confederate soldiers also went on the move, fighting across the South and the Mid-Atlantic states, while plantation owners abandoned their human and material property and sought refuge away from the front lines. Former slaves wrested freedom from their absentee owners and then, having secured that freedom, joined the cash economy and sought to become citizens. The tensions in the interactions between these groups were manifested materially, and the resulting artifacts survive as extant objects or textual references within the archive. Bound together in an investigation of place, the piano presents a powerful narrative of American history through the making and unmaking of the plantation space.
The Material Culture of Furniture Production in the British Colonies
Authors: Cooke Edward S.
Published: May 2020

Artifacts have long been markers of wealth, status, self-identity, or taste. As a result, most studies of social distinction in British and American material culture have tended to focus upon the consumption/possession perspective. To explore the production side of material culture distinction, this chapter focuses upon furniture history, examining the structures of furniture making in colonial British society. Comparative exploration of America in the eighteenth century, India in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and Australia in the early nineteenth century provides a sense of how the social structure of production operated, how it affected the look of the objects, and how it has continued to influence contemporary understanding of these objects. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the backgrounds of cabinetmakers had a direct impact on the possibilities of their work and prospects. These period distinctions have subsequently fostered a different sort of distinction today wherein the skills and legacy of nonwhite and convict cabinetmakers, the artisanal “other” in the British Empire, continue to be undervalued or ignored. Beautiful collected objects often distract us from the analysis of the systems of their production or an ethical critique of those systems.
Cloth and the Rituals of Encounter in La Florida
Authors: Johnson Laura
Published: May 2020

Elaborate rituals, from the cleared space of encounter to physical gestures and gifts, developed over the course of the sixteenth century in La Florida as Native met European. Searching for a common symbolism between cultures is often limited to those items that both groups recognize and use in a similar fashion. Those are frequently reduced to lived experiences, or the material culture of the body: food, shelter, and clothes. Almost all early Florida encounter rituals involved the body: touch, perception, and presentation of physical form. As this code developed, clothes became one of the most common methods of achieving connections as individuals chose items of dress to do some of the work of cultural interpretation that resonated with their own experiences and parent cultures. Beginning with early Spanish Florida and moving chronologically as other European powers entered the region, this chapter explores how these metaphorical encoding and decoding sessions developed. In the discursive and physical worlds of the early American southeast, textiles were key metaphors for connection and recognition. By the end of the sixteenth century, many Native groups from Carolina to Florida had a working knowledge of European textiles and their metaphorical role in the rituals of encounter.
Collecting as Historical Practice and the Conundrum of the Unmoored Object
Authors: Whalen Catherine L.
Published: May 2020

Collecting drives scholarship. Historians rely upon texts, preserved in libraries, archives, and private hands. Scholars of material culture seek out artifacts, whether held by museums, galleries, historical societies, or individual owners. Historians contemplating material culture evidence are justifiably wary of its frustrating ambiguity; especially recalcitrant are objects unmoored from their points of origin with no textual support. How can one tether these obdurate things to meaningful interpretive frameworks? By the late nineteenth century, Americana collectors were tackling—and meeting—this challenge, laying the foundation for US material culture studies. Their endeavors were significant forays into object-driven histories, exemplifying the constitutive interplay between collecting material culture and interpreting the past. One such collector-historian was George Dudley Seymour, a self-described “born antiquarian.” He sought out and studied early New England architecture and decorative arts, especially when associated with Nathan Hale, an American spy captured and hanged by British forces during the Revolutionary War. In the context of the Colonial Revival, a long-standing manifestation of US romantic nationalism, Seymour resurrected Hale’s faded memory countrywide. Initially lacking documentary sources, he succeeded by employing three material strategies—inscribed artifacts, space and place, and figural representation—illustrating the efficacy of integrating multiple approaches to interpreting history and material culture within a biographical framework.
Boston Electric
Authors: Schechner Sara J.
Published: May 2020

Electricity was a new and developing field of research during the eighteenth century. With a focus on the experimental apparatus employed and the sociable exchange of ideas, this chapter examines how electricity was taught to Harvard students and members of polite society in the Boston area over the course of the century. Without local instrument makers or suppliers of glass and brass parts, colonial American experimenters had to import equipment and repair parts from London. When time and money discouraged imports, they became bricoleurs, incorporating recycled, traded, and ready-to-hand materials into their apparatus. Benjamin Franklin was an important intermediary in getting scientific instruments from London to Boston and Cambridge, and he shared instructional know-how so that locals could assemble their own Leyden jars and other electrical instruments.
From Confiscation to Collection
Authors: Ho Denise Y.
Published: May 2020

This chapter examines two categories of material culture from the People’s Republic of China: the remnants of pre-1949 “old society,” designated the “four olds” and the focus of confiscations during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), and the products of “new society,” made for socialist New China. Using archival material and oral histories, this chapter demonstrates how objects were associated with class during the Cultural Revolution. Objects and class were related in two significant ways: an object’s class category came from the labor that begat it, and—as possessions were confiscated during the Red Guards’ house searches—the class status of the owner was reflected in the object. This chapter also considers the post-Mao afterlives of everyday objects as collectors’ items and the limits on their interpretation in private museums. Both socialist and postsocialist China have found it easier to confiscate/collect objects of the past rather than to grapple with their symbolism, which has become both more powerful and more diverse than ever prescribed by revolution.
Sensiotics, or the Study of the Senses in Material Culture and History in Africa and Beyond
Authors: Drewal Henry John
Published: May 2020

The objective of this chapter is to demonstrate the essential unity of body and mind in opposition to an enduring and distorting Cartesian dualism and distinction between mind and body. The senses are crucial to understandings of material culture, history, and more. The theoretical and methodological approach that incorporates this premise is sensiotics. Sensiotics is the study of the senses in the formation of material forms, persons, cultures, and histories, with a focus on bodily knowledge in the creative process as well as in reception by body-minds. Over the last two decades or more, there has been a transdisciplinary turn away from texts to bodies and the senses, owing in part to recent research on body-mind unities and interactions. Sensing is constitutive of cognition. Here I outline sensiotics and, from my work among Yorùbá-speaking peoples of West Africa, give examples of various multisensory experiences that constitute elements of a Yorùbá sensorium. This approach has important implications universally.
Mapping History in Clay and Skin
Authors: Berns Marla C.
Published: May 2020

Ga’anda people of northeastern Nigeria employ various strategies to preserve and transmit key knowledge of historical events, including the production of material objects decorated to serve as landscapes of memory. The most important of these objects are the ceramic vessels that women artists produce to contain Ga’anda spirit protectors and culture bearers—especially Mbir’thleng’nda and Ngum-Ngumi, who are credited with leading Ga’anda people in their migration westward to their present location. The surfaces of the vessels containing Mbir’thleng’nda and Ngum-Ngumi are embellished with motifs that distinguish their identities and define their meanings and purposes. Patterns of raised nodes or impressed ridges in clay are their most notable shared feature. These patterns render the vessels “scarified” with designs identical to those visible on the skin of Ga’anda women. This scarification, or Thleta, was completed in stages, beginning in a girl’s adolescence, and was a prerequisite to marriage. Though no longer practiced, the permanent alteration of a woman’s skin created a language of history, identity, and collective remembrance for Ga’anda. Thleta designs became a template for inscribing meaning and efficacy in other things, whether gourd bowls for serving food or the most sacred ceramic vessels used to contain, invoke, and supplicate influential Ga’anda tutelary deities.
Materialities in the Making of World Histories
Authors: Sivasundaram Sujit
Published: May 2020

With the aim of interrogating material culture in the origins of the globalized discipline of history, this chapter considers some objects of historical narration in the wider world. The focus is on how these material objects engaged with the physicality of print. There were entanglements and layerings of materiality, across the problematic and traditional divides of oral and textual, ephemeral and durable, localized and global. Two different contexts that experienced the invasive power of British and Euro-American colonialism, nineteenth-century Sri Lanka and New Zealand, are brought together. From Sri Lanka, palm-leaf manuscripts, which narrate the moment of British arrival and warfare with the British, are studied for their flexibility, which set the terms for the national and racial politics of colonial print histories. From Aotearoa New Zealand, genealogies charting ancestral origin are studied for their afterlife in print. This comparison between Sri Lanka and New Zealand allows the plural origins of the discipline of history to be tracked. These plural origins were flattened over time into a connected and globalized imperial narrative of uniformity as colonial print was diffused in the form of books and periodicals and as these materials constructed a linear history of progress. To understand the encompassing power of imperialism is to see empire as a collection of material culture, which generated the meaning of history as a universal narrative in words and print.
Making Knowledge Claims in the Eighteenth-Century British Museum
Authors: Gaskell Ivan
Published: May 2020

Since at least the eighteenth century, Western museums have constituted a technology for making knowledge claims based on the selection, observation, and categorization of a wide range of material things. The underlying schema of museums has changed little since that time, and it assumes certain fundamental distinctions such as that between things in nature and things human-made (the natural and the artificial), and between interchangeable representatives of kinds (specimens) and unique items valued for their aesthetic properties (artworks). This fundamental schema is so stable and authoritative that it can implicitly overrule conflicting taxonomic and systematic claims about museum collections. One example of such a challenge is the volume by the Dutch artist and medical illustrator active in England in the second half of the eighteenth century, Jan van Rymsdyk, and his son, Andreas or Andrew, Museum Brittanicum (1778; second edition, 1791). Rymsdyk proposes a taxonomy of things in the world based on resemblance rather than differentiation, using the technology of the folio book incorporating detailed realistic engravings after his own and his son’s highly naturalistic watercolor drawings of items in the British Museum. These conditions and practices have considerable implications for how historians might use as evidence actual material things in museum collections and representations of them in whatever medium, analog or digital.
The Sensory Web of Vision
Authors: Morgan David
Published: May 2020

Scholars can interpret images as historical artifacts that perform enchantment. I will define enchantment as the action that images perform as part of a network of other things such as people, other images, and places. To this group of agents, we may add other actors such as lore, ritual, and the physical setting in which people encounter images. Taken together, these components form the ecology of vision. An image does not operate alone, but as part of an extended network or assemblage that engages viewers. One of the primary ways in which the assemblage is engaged is as a system of exchange, or intercession. Devotion to the Veil of Veronica will serve as a case study to show all of this at work.
Introduction
Authors: Dimmendaal Gerrit J. , Vossen Rainer
Published: May 2020

This chapter explains the goals and describes the overall structure of the book. It gives reasons for the range of eight major subject areas (Parts II through IX) into which the work is divided, and which are considered to be of particular relevance in African linguistics today. These involve the usual domains of grammar in synchronic linguistics (Part II), with the exception of semantics; linguistic typology and language comparison from a genetic point of view are central to Part III; a detailed investigation of all major language families with special focus on lower-level genetic groupings (Part IV) is followed by case studies of eighteen languages from different language families (Part V); language, cognition, and culture are discussed in Part VI; sociolinguistics is central to Part VII, whereas the role of language in historical studies is discussed in Part VIII; the final chapters (in Part IX) investigate the link between language and orature.
Linguistic Isolates
Authors: Dimmendaal Gerrit J.
Published: May 2020

Next to three major phyla and a range of smaller language families, one finds several linguistic isolates on the African continent. The fact that many isolates are found at the periphery of expansion zones, where they are part of accretion zones, suggests that they represent the last representatives of language families which have become extinct. Climate change, social innovations, and technological innovations probably forced groups to adapt to new situations, which often involved language shift. The genetic classification of these isolates is often problematic because it is difficult to differentiate between borrowing and genetic inheritance, as no closely related languages apparently survived.
Sandawe
Authors: Eaton Helen
Published: May 2020

Sandawe (Khoisan, Tanzania) is a highly suffixal language with an intricate system of marking grammatical relations and number. The language makes extensive use of derivation between word classes and uses tone to create genitive noun phrases and distinguish certain clause types. The realis/irrealis distinction is key to understanding the different means of subject marking in Sandawe. Realis verbs allow multiple pronominal subject clitics and a subject focus marker, whereas in the irrealis, the subject is marked only on the verb itself. Aspect marking is achieved by coordinating verbs or through object marking. Conjunctions which are marked for the subject of the clause are used to express consecutive events in narratives. Constituent order is SOV, but preposing and postposing of constituents may take place, according to information structure considerations.
Ethio-Semitic
Authors: Porkhomovsky Victor
Published: May 2020

Ethio-Semitic languages form a group within the Semitic family of the Afro-Asiatic language phylum. In all the surveys of languages and language families of the world this group of languages in Ethiopia and Eritrea is always present and is by default treated as a genetic unit within Semitic. Its traditional status is supported by a long history of population medley, language contacts, and interference within the framework of areal linguistics, comparative linguistics, and sociocultural, geographical, and ecological paradigms. The internal classification of Ethio-Semitic provokes many controversies on all levels, including the language ~ dialect level. This chapter describes and explains this problematic nature, taking into account morphological isoglosses such as prefix conjugation and suffix conjugation.
ǁX’egwi
Authors: Honken Henry
Published: May 2020

ǁXegwi is an extinct member of the !Ui family (Khoisan) that was originally spoken near Lake Chrissie in South Africa. Unlike the majority of !Ui languages, ǁXegwi has been the subject of several field studies. This chapter draws on both published and archival materials to sketch ǁXegwi phonology and grammatical structure. ǁXegwi is unique in several respects: it is the only southern African language lacking a palatal click and unusual in the degree to which it has borrowed from Bantu. It is also a typical !Ui language and important for the reconstruction of nominal number and the Proto-!Ui verbal system.
Language Birth
Authors: Hurst Ellen
Published: May 2020

“Youth” or “town” languages are developing in contemporary African urban centers amongst conditions of multilingualism, globalization, and superdiversity. A number of these languages have been described by researchers, notably Nouchi (Ivory Coast), Town Bemba (Zambia), Tsotsitaal (South Africa), Camfranglais (Cameroon), and Sheng (Kenya). This chapter seeks to outline the current understanding of scholars working on the topic and to use examples from the varieties above to consider the following questions: are there common linguistic strategies or characteristics that can be described for these varieties? What differences between the examples arise as a result of national contextual factors? Can these examples of language variation be explained by the concept of language “birth”, or are the varieties merely “slang” registers? The chapter makes the argument that overly simplistic categorization may obscure the diverse and creative strategies and styles that are being employed in these complex contexts.
Phonology and Phonetics
Authors: Kenstowicz Michael J.
Published: May 2020

This chapter focuses on the contributions African languages have made to phonological theory. The first section reviews some of the highlights in the development of autosegmental representations, concentrating on the interface of sound segments with prosodic structure. It is shown how one–many and many–one relations between phonemes and syllable positions elucidate the behavior of geminate consonants and the compensatory lengthening that accompanies processes of devocalization and prenasalization. The sections that follow consider the African contribution to studies concerning the scope and limits of phonological variation. Typologies of vowel harmony, vowel hiatus resolution and nasal-consonant coalescence, syllabification, reduplication, and phonological phrasing are surveyed.
Waja
Authors: Kleinewillinghöfer Ulrich
Published: May 2020

Waja is spoken in Southern Gombe State, NE Nigeria. It is the largest language of the Tula-Waja group. Waja is one of the few “Adamawa” noun class languages and also one of the key languages validating the notion of an “Adamawa-Gur” genetic unit. In Waja, noun class markers are suffixed to the nouns, while the basic pattern of concord marking is bilateral affixation/cliticization. Verbs have three basic forms: two contrasting aspectual verb forms, “definite” and “indefinite”, and verbal nouns. Productive verb extensions are pluractional, altrilocal-ventive, passive/intransitive, applicative, directional, and benefactive. Basic motion and posture verbs form their own verb class, and they require copy pronouns. The basic word order in clauses is SVO; the head noun generally precedes modifiers. Notable phonological features of Waja are ATR vowel harmony with twelve phonetic and nine phonemic vowels, and prenasalized and labialized stops.
African Languages in Information and Communications Technology
Authors: Lexander Kristin Vold
Published: May 2020

Africa is experiencing immense growth in the use of information technology (IT). Studies of this “Digital Revolution” have tended to focus on social and economic development issues, while lately also studies on the use of African languages on the Internet and in mobile telephony have emerged. Of particular interest is the use of African languages in written electronic communication: does IT increase the marginalization of African languages or does it create a space for their blossoming? This question will be examined in the chapter, considering the extension and the nature of the use of African languages in communication mediated by IT, like websites and electronic discussion forums, emails, instant messaging, social networking sites, and text messages. The technological dimensions related to writing systems, different efforts aiming at the standardization of keyboards, and the translation of software will also be discussed.
Central Cushitic
Authors: Leyew Zelealem
Published: May 2020

This chapter describes the Central Cushitic (hereafter CC) language family, one of four branches of Cushitic. CC, traditionally known as Agäw, contains four languages: Awŋi, Bilin, Kemantney, and Xamt’aŋa. Apart from Bilin, which is spoken in Eritrea, the CC languages are spoken in the central highlands of Ethiopia. The name CC was evidently given to Agäw on account of the geographical distribution of the North, South, East and the then West Cushitic (later Omotic) subgroups. The morphology, especially the verb morphology, identifies the CC languages as Cushitic, but they are classified as a separate branch of Cushitic on the basis of salient features exhibited in them. CC languages exhibit striking similarities in the lexicon, and due to longstanding language contact there exists much inter-influence with the Ethio-Semitic languages. These and other linguistic properties of CC are discussed in this chapter.
Kolisi
Authors: Leyew Zelealem
Published: May 2020

Kolisi is one of the least-known Ethiopian languages classified under the Central Cushitic (Agäw) language family. It has seven vowels and twenty-five consonants. As a typical Agäw language, the velar nasal /ŋ/, the alveolar affricate /ts/, and the velar fricative /x/ are among the archaic phonemes. Vowel length is not phonemic. Ejective sounds are absent. There are relics of prefix conjugation, but the language chiefly exhibits suffix conjugation. Verbs consist of a stem and agreeing suffixes of person, number, and gender as well as tense and mood. No gender distinction is shown in personal pronouns. Most nouns end in vowels where /-i/ indicates masculine and /-a/ feminine. Plural is marked heterogeneously but the morpheme /-ka/ appears most frequently. Accusative case is marked by the morpheme /-wa/. Kolisi is an SOV language and predominantly head-final. In complex sentences, subordinate clause precedes main clause.
Mixed Languages
Authors: Mous Maarten
Published: May 2020

Ma’á/Mbugu is a famous and classic case of a mixed language spoken in Tanzania. The mixed language is in fact a parallel lexicon to a Bantu language, one that is very close to Pare. Both are widely spoken by the community, and existence of the mixed version is a strong marker of their identity and sets them apart from the other populations in the Usambara mountains. The parallel lexicon contains words from a South Cushitic source, Maasai, an earlier East Cushitic source, and manipulated words from the regular lexicon. The language evolved out of a parallel lexicon after language shift from a Cushitic language.
Zande
Authors: Pasch Helma
Published: May 2020

The morphology of Zande (Ubangi) has been known since the earliest descriptions of the 1920s by Gore and Lagae. This chapter focuses on recently discovered syntactic features. The first are the functions of three copulas, the functions of the two series of personal pronouns in possessive constructions, and the functions of secondary predicates. There are also intransitive copy pronouns which mark substantivized adjectives, floating quantifiers and numerals which follow the entire noun phrase, and the functions of the preposition be ‘from, because of’ which is derived from the denotation for ‘hand’. The verb ya ‘say’ has undergone multiple grammaticalizations and functions as a complementizer, and in serial verb constructions it marks immediate anteriority or ineffective attempt.
Experiencer Constructions
Authors: Zoch Ulrike
Published: May 2020

Cross-linguistically, experiencer constructions tend to show certain peculiarities which have been studied extensively for South Asian and some Indo-European languages. Due to the ambiguity of the experiencer role—semantically right between a prototypical agent and a patient—many languages make use of different kinds of constructions that encode experiential situations, highlighting or downplaying certain semantic aspects of the experiencer role, and thereby specifying the exertion of volition, initiation, causation, and control on the part of the experiencer, or of the stimulus. The aim of this chapter is to give an overview of some lexico-grammatical means which African languages use to codify experiential situations, especially with regard to modulation of certain semantic aspects of the experiencer role.
Mande
Authors: Schreiber Henning
Published: May 2020

The chapter surveys the history of classification of Mande languages from the first attempts in 1849 to the most recent ones on the basis of quantitative approaches to language classification, linguistic reconstruction, and theories on language stability. It discusses various proposals for the internal genealogical relationship of Mande languages and examines their advances and differences in the light of methodological aspects and availability of reliable linguistic data. Special emphasis is laid on the historical tan/fu dichotomy and its revision. Typological issues are treated in the discussion of Mande-specific typological obstacles for lexicostatistic classification. The problem of internal convergence for the linguistic classification of Mande is exemplified in particular in accounting the impact of Greater Manding. The effect of changes in classification methodology by the introduction of phylogenetic methods and theoretical assumptions about language stability are addressed in the final discussion of a revised classification of Mande.
East Cushitic
Authors: Tosco Mauro
Published: May 2020

This chapter discusses the internal classification of East Cushitic, alongside a brief history of the debate, and different classificatory proposals. The aim being genetic classification, typological and areal features are mentioned only in so far as they impinge on matters of genetic subgrouping. The chapter proposes a classification based upon shared innovations and successive binary splits. The soundness of the old and elusive concept of “Lowland East Cushitic” is discussed. In the end, an overarching opposition between a Lowland and Highland branch is proposed, with the latter being the result of specific innovations. Within Lowland, the development (not shared by Saho-Afar) of preverbal subject clitics gave rise to a majority group (Southern Lowland), which was in its turn split into a Nuclear subgroup made up of Oromoid and Omo-Tana (with Oromo and Somali as major representatives), with the Dullay cluster and Yaaku as residual peripheral languages (possibly a genetic subgroup of its own).
North Cushitic
Authors: Vanhove Martine
Published: May 2020

The North Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic phylum consists of only one language, Beja. Lexicostatistic studies show that only 20% of the basic vocabulary is shared with the two closest East Cushitic languages, Afar and Saho, and with Agaw, a Central Cushitic language. It is hardly half of that ratio for the geographically more distant East Cushitic languages, Sidamo and Oromo. Considering that Beja was too different from other Cushitic languages in too many respects, Hetzron proposed setting it apart from Cushitic as an independent branch of Afro-Asiatic. Since the pioneering works of Reinisch, Roper, and Hudson new fieldwork on Beja has been conducted by several scholars in Sudan, Egypt, and Eritrea, which provided new data and insights on the language and its dialectal diversification. Based on all the available studies, this chapter presents and discusses the state of the art for the classification of North Cushitic and reports on recent progress.
Dan
Authors: Vydrin Valentin
Published: May 2020

The Mande language Dan, which is spoken in the West African countries of Guinea, the Ivory Coast, and Liberia, is among the few African languages that distinguish between five tone registers. Metrical feet in this language play a role with respect to nasal harmony as well as tonal and vocalic combinations. This chapter also presents a general overview of simple and complex sentences, with a special focus on locative marking, which constitutes a prominent morphosyntactic feature of Dan nouns, as well as on lability, which is a typologically interesting feature of the other major category in the language, the verb.