Sereer Grammar

This is the Wiki page for research on the Saalum (or Saloum) dialect of Sereer, as conducted by the 2012-2013 Graduate Field Methods class in the UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics.

Sereer is a language of the Senegambian branch of the Niger–Congo languages spoken by 1.2 million people in Senegal and 30,000 in The Gambia. It is the principal language of the Sereer people. Some documentation of Sereer exists; however, most existing documentation is for the significantly different Siin dialect (MacLaughlin 1994, 2000, 2005).

Morphosyntactically, Sereer is largely head-initial, suffixing, and agglutinative (especially in the case of derivational verbal morphology). A clause's tense, aspect, person-number agreement, and negation are most frequently expressed in polyexponent verbal suffixes, although prefixing or procliticizing of person-number agreement sometimes occurs. The language is notable for its extensive noun class concord and its system of consonant mutations, the latter of which is exploited in the language's numerous processes of nonconcatenative inflectional and derivational morphology. Sereer also makes use of an unusually large number of stop consonants, including areally unusual uvulars and an extremely rare series of phonemic voiceless implosive stops.

Ancillary pages

• Serer lexicon

List monomorphemic lexical items and associated information here.

• Recordings and transcriptions

Upload recordings and annotations here.

• FLEx files

Backup and download the FLEx files here.

• Individual session wordlists

This is where wordlists for individual elicitation sessions can be uploaded and checked to avoid redundant work.

• Class presentation and assignments

Upload completed PDFs of class presentations and class assignments here.

• Code toolbox

Find code here to make things (tables, interlinear glosses) on the Wiki.

• Sereer-Siin vocabulary

A list of lexical items with French and English translations, from Fal (1980), to be checked against Sereer Saloum and possibly to flesh out minimal pairs

Phonology

The phonology of Sereer is characterized by a large inventory of consonants, particularly stops, and a vowel length distinction. The surface form of these segments is fairly predictable, due in part to the relatively rigid phonotactics of Sereer. Sereer is a stress language.

Main page: Phonological Inventory

Note: a list of minimal pairs can be found here.

Phonological Inventory

Consonants

Sereer's consonant inventory makes use of some combinations of parameters that are unusual cross-linguistically, including contrastive voicing in both egressive and ingressive stops. Sereer also has multiple uvular phonemes, a rarity for sub-Saharan Africa. The unusually large size of the consonant inventory is largely due to its 21 phonemically distinct oral stops.

The consonant inventory of Sereer Saalum is given below. Working orthography for a given symbol is indicated in parentheses following a symbol if the orthography differs from the IPA.

Sereer Saalum Consonant Phonemes

		Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
	Voiceless	p	t	c	k	q	ʔ (')
	Voiced	b	d	ɟ (j)	g
Stops	Implosive	ɓ	ɗ	ʄ
	Voiceless Implosive	ƥ	ƭ	ƈ
	Prenasalized	ᵐb (mb)	ⁿd (nd)	ᶮɟ (nj)	ᵑg (ng)	ᶰɢ (nq)
Nasal		m	n	ɲ (ñ)	ŋ
Fricative		f	s			χ (x)
Tap/Trill			r
Liquid			l
Glide		w		j (y)

Additional information about the realization of these consonants as well as minimal pairs can be found in the more detailed description of the Phonological Inventory. Spectrograms and Audio Samples of Consonants are also available.

Vowels

The vowel inventory of Sereer Saalum is given below. Vowel length is contrastive; all vowels have long versions.

Sereer Saalum Vowel Phonemes

	Front	Central	Back
High	i ii		u uu
Mid	e ee		o oo
Low		a aa

Vowels after implosive consonants are sometimes creaky; this is not contrastive.

Phonotactics

Main page: Phonotactics

The Sereer syllable template is CV(V)(C). All stems must have a consonantal onset, and codas are optional. The nucleus of a syllable is nearly always a short or long vowel; the only exception is syllabic m=, which is an allomorph of um=, the strong first person singular agreement marker.

Vowel length distinctions are never affected by onset or coda consonants. Any C may appear in the onset or coda of a syllable. There are no onset or coda clusters, except very rarely in loan words. All consonant clusters that do occur in Sereer are formed across a syllable boundary.

Stress

Main page: Stress

Sereer exhibits non-contrastive stress. Stress is largely assigned metrically, with a preference for left-anchored iambs (if V-shaped prefixes are taken to be part of the noun's phonological word), or right-anchored trochees (if they are not). While vowel length affects stress assignment, coda consonants do not contribute to syllable weight or affect stress.

Morphology

Sereer is a highly synthetic language, especially with regard to verbs, which may take numerous derivational and inflectional suffixes. Typically, both nouns and verbs only take a single prefix. Typologically notable aspects of Sereer morphology include mutation of stem-initial consonants, extensive verb derivational affixing, and numerous distinct reduplicative processes.

Morphophonological Processes

Consonant Mutation

Main page: Consonant mutation

Sereer has three distinct patterns of consonant mutation, which occur in different contexts throughout the language. All three processes affect the initial consonant of a stem in largely predictable ways. These processes are detailed in the page on phonological alternations.

Reduplication

Main page: Reduplication

Reduplication is prevalent in Sereer, occurring in verbs, nouns, and prepositions in three different structures. Bare stative verbs can be fully reduplicated at the end of sentences: ambeel ale axooɗa xooɗ 'The lake is deep'. Agentive nouns are derived from verb stems through partial reduplication of the stem: xoox 'cultivate' > oqooxoox 'farmer'. Locative prepositions can be reduplicated to indicate precision: pam 'next to' > pam e pam 'right next to'.

Vowel hiatus (word internal)

Word-internal hiatus can be resolved by epenthesis of either a glottal stop or a glide between the two vowels: fi'aam "I do/make" but not *fiaam. A /y/ can be inserted as well: afiya "he does/makes"

Nominal Morphology

Sereer nouns fall into fourteen noun classes (nine distinct patterns of singular-plural alternation), which indicate both number and agreement with determiners and adjectives. Noun class markers are prefixed to the stem, and in some cases will trigger mutation of the initial consonant of the stem. Adjectives agree with the noun they modify; this agreement is morphologically realized via concordant prefixes.

Example:

a-tuul a-tadak a-ƥaal ak-e

(ak-pig ak-three ak-black ak-DET.prox)

‘three small black pigs'

Noun classes

Main page: Noun classes

There are eight distinct patterns for singular nouns and six for plural nouns. Four of these patterns (two singular and two plural) are exclusively devoted to two noun classes, consisting of reflexes of productive augmentative and diminutive derivational processes (the gak/gal and ong/fn noun classes, respectively). Two of these paterns are exclusively devoted to the ox/w noun class, which consists entirely of nouns denoting humans. The other eight patterns combine in a non-corresponding fashion in six further noun classes, which have no obvious semantic basis in modern Sereer.

Noun class examples

Class	Example	Det.	English	Plural	Det.
ox/w	o-tew	oxe	woman	Ø-rew	we
ol/ax	o-fiɗ	ole	butterfly	xa-piɗ	axe
l/ak	Ø-xomb	le	turtle	a-qomb	ake
f/k	Ø-xaarit	fe	friend	Ø-qaarit	ke
n/k	Ø-nqoox	ne	bull	Ø-qoox	ke
al/k	a-mbeel	ale	lake	Ø-peel	ke
al/ak	a-koong	ale	monkey	a-koong	ake
ong/ax	o-nqool	onge	moon	xa-qool	axe
ong/fn	o-ndew	onge	woman (DIM)	fo-ndew	ne
gal/gak	ga-ndew gi-ndew	ale	woman (AUG)	ga-ndew	ake

All al/k nouns have an initial prenasalized consonant; all al/ak nouns do not. Because of this, the plural form of any regular noun is predictable from the definite singular form. See irregular nouns for more information.

Nominalization

Sereer has multiple deverbal nominalization processes. Agent nominalization is a reduplicative process whereby the body of the first syllable of the verb stem is reduplicated: lay 'talk' > olaalay 'one who talks a lot'. Other deverbal nominalizations, including event and instrument nominalization, are zero-derivational processes; the verb stem is treated as a noun stem, with a noun class prefix added as with all other nouns in Sereer. The resulting noun class of these deverbal nouns is as of yet unpredictable.

Noun-Noun Derivation

Noun-noun derivation can be accomplished in Sereer by changing the noun class of a noun. Two noun class pairs - augmentatives and diminutives - are almost exclusively populated in this fashion. The augmentative and diminutive derivation processes are highly productive. There are also a few noun-noun pairs that indicate derivational processes to other noun classes; however, these are unpredictable and unproductive. See Related Nouns for more information.

Parts of the Noun Phrase

Nominal Modifiers

Numerals

Possessives with Adjectives

Determiners and Demonstratives

Quantifiers

Verbal Morphology

There are two potential verb templates in Sereer. The first is used in almost all TAM situations:

Main verb template:

Aspect marking (auxiliary) | Subject | STEM | Derivation | Tense | 1sg/2sg subject* | =Object

Negation is not listed in the table above, because it is always a portmanteau with tense when marked. A 1sg or 2sg subject is only marked as a suffix when no preverbal morphology (i.e., an aspectual auxiliary verb) is present. Otherwise, 1sg/2sg subjects are marked in prefixes, like the rest of subject marking always is.

The second type of verbal template used marks subject in a different place. So far, this only happens when the special auxiliary xe/we 'progressive' is used:

xe/we verb template:

Subject (all) | xe/we | STEM | Derivation | Tense | =Object

Inflectional Verbal Morphology

Main page: Inflectional Verbal Morphology Verbs in Sereer are inflected for person and number agreement, negation, tense and aspect, and a number of other categories. Sereer also makes use of a number of auxiliary constructions. Inflectional morphemes are strictly ordered as follows:

Auxiliary

Subject clitic

ROOT

Extensions

Past

Future

Past imperfect

Negation

Finiteness

AX

Object

Subject

Relativization

-xe xan, fat, bar kaa naa

(i)n, (u)m, i o, nu a, te, de

many

-'

-k

-eeg

-ee(r), -ir, -(i)i

-a -u -e -aa

-ax

-(a)am -(o)ng -(i)n

-(u)m -(o)

-(ii)(n)a

Derivational Verbal Morphology

Main page: Derivational Verbal Morphology

Derivational morphology of Sereer verbs is almost entirely suffixing and is mostly concatenative. Verbal derivational affixes can be used to form other verbs, adjectives, or nouns, often with accompanying stem consonant mutation. Verb to verb derivational morphology produces valency-changing operations or indicates associated motion ('to go and do X'), etc. Most derivational morphology is of the form -V(V)C and, if the vowel is short, can be contracted to -C in contexts where illegal CCC clusters will not be created.

Reduplication is used to create agentive nouns, and various other deverbal nouns are formed with the attachment of noun class prefixal agreement morphology and concomitant consonantal mutations.

Syntax

The basic word order of Sereer is S-V-O.

Sereer is mostly head initial/final, evidence from auxiliaries, relatives, adpositions, etc.

main clause word order and pronominalization

• many of these data should be included in the following section

Verb phrases

Main page: Verb Phrases

Verb phrases (VP's) in Sereer consist of a verb optionally modified by any or all of the following components: any number of adverbs, a noun phrase, or a prepositional phrase. These components are ordered as follows:

1) Verb
2) Adverb / Noun Phrase / Prepositional Phrase

Not enough studies of constituent order in discourse have been conducted to allow generalizations regarding the sensitivity of Sereer to pragmatic principles in constituent ordering, although pragmatic factors influence constituent order to some degree.

Noun phrases

Main page: Noun Phrases

Noun phrases (NPs) in Sereer consist of a noun optionally modified by any or all of the following components: any number of adjectives, a single determiner, a prepositional phrase, a relative clause, and a possessive NP. These components are ordered as follows:

1) Noun

2) Adjectives (in any order)

3) Determiner

4) PP and/or Relative clause (in either order)

5) Possessive NP

Adjectives and determiners agree in noun class with the head of the NP.

Adjectives and Adverbs

Adjectives

Main page: Adjectives

Sereer uses a handful of predicational and modificational patterns to put across properties and attributes of nominals, but does not have a dedicated adjectival word class. (Please see the section on Nominal Modifiers above for more details on noun class agreement). Some more prototypical adjectival morphologies include the suffix -u and a nominalizing construction involving the relative pronoun na.

Adverbs

Main page: Adverbs

Adpositions

Main page: Adpositions

Adpositions serve to mark a semantic relationship between adjacent noun phrases in a sentence. Sereer exhibits exclusively prepositions, which are morphologically free particles.

Negation

Main page: Negation

Negation is marked by a suffix on the verb. We have not yet found any negator that functions as a separate word. The exact form of negation is conditioned by voice, tense, and (maybe?) clause type.

Focus and Extraction

Main page: Extraction or Focus

Sereer has grammaticalized focus marking, which involves fronting of the focused element and (often) specific verbal morphology. An example is below: (1) has no focus while (2) has focus on the object Yande:

<gl fontsize=11> anafa Yande \gll a= naf-a Yande 3sg.sbj hit-fv Yande \trans He hit Yande. </gl>

<gl fontsize=11> Yande anafu \gll Yande a= naf-u Yande 3sg.sbj hit-foc \trans It's Yande he hit. (165) </gl>

In (2), the object Yande has been fronted to indicate focus on that object, and the morphology on the verb has changed. Instead fo the final vowel being -a, it is -u. Such constructions sometimes also appear in wh-questions, as seen below:

<gl fontsize=11> xar ajawu \gll xar a= jaw-u what 3sg.sbj cook-foc \trans What did he cook? </gl>

In (3), the same marking is used on the verb as in (2), but this time the fronted constituent is a wh-question word. Since both focus and wh-question formation are usually analyzed as involving some kind of extraction or movement on the focus/wh-constituent, this special morphology can be analyzed as extraction marking. For a more detailed discussion of the issues at hand, click here.

Mood and Utterance Type

Non-declarative mood in Sereer is introduced through the use of clause-initial (preverbal) uninflected "particles" to mark hortative and prohibitive moods along with polar questions. Fronted WH-constituencies mark WH- questions, and the fronted content appears in the same zone as the preverbal particles. Extraction marking also appears on the verb in the case of WH-questions.

Imperatives and Procedurals

Questions

Subordination

Sereer has a variety of subordination strategies. These are:

• Finite complement clauses preceded by one of the complementizers (y)ee or ndax (which derives embedded polar questions and may also occur in matrix polar questions).
• Finite adverbial clauses which involve a variety of adverbial complement clauses.
• Conditional/sequential clauses which involve the verbal suffix -ang.
• Non-finite (perhaps 'infinitival') clauses with the non-finite marker o.
• Relative clauses which involve the relative suffix -na and a relative determiner.
• Free relative clauses which may function as complement or adverbial clauses. These involve the relative suffix -na and a limited set of relative determiner.

• Relative Clauses

Relative clauses in Sereer are externally headed with the head coming before the relativized clause. Clauses are relativized by suffixing ‘’’-na’’’ to the verb . It appears that any noun in Sereer can head a relative clause, regardless of its syntactic position within that clause.

• Complement Clauses

• Adverbial Clauses

Texts

File:121011G 067 Sereer time anecdote.wav

File:Sereer 121010I MR millet text.wav

File:Sereer 121010I MR millet text.TextGrid

Other Pages

- MediaWiki Handbook - Bari grammar (old main page) - Recordings and transcriptions (Bari) - Bari lexicon