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
List monomorphemic lexical items and associated information here.
Upload recordings and annotations here.
Backup and download the FLEx files here.
This is where wordlists for individual elicitation sessions can be uploaded and checked to avoid redundant work.
Upload completed PDFs of class presentations and class assignments here.
Find code here to make things (tables, interlinear glosses) on the Wiki.
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 has stress rather than tone.
Main article: Phonological Inventory
Phonological Inventory
Consonants
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.
Some discussion of the notable properties of this inventory should be provided.
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| V'less | p | t | c | k | q | ʔ (') | |
| Voi. | b | d | ɟ (j) | g | |||
| Stops | Impl. | ɓ | ɗ | ʄ | |||
| V'less Impl. | ƥ | ƭ | ƈ | ||||
| Prenas. | 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.
| 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.
Vowel hiatus, perhaps on an attached page?
Phonotactics
Maximal syllable structure is CVC. The syllable template more broadly seems to be (C)V(V)(C), with an optional onset and coda, and the option of short or long vowels completely independent of these. Any C may appear in the onset, and so far it appears that any C may appear in the coda. To perform this analysis is it necessary to assume that prenasalized stops, which may occur alone in both onsets and codas, are actually single segments rather than sequences of nasal + voiced stop.
For more on this topic, see Phonotactics.
Stress
Serer makes use of 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). Some irregularities, especially concerning the frequent noun plural agreement prefix xa-, are yet to be worked out.
Morphology
All of the sections below here eventually need some basic text. The text in the sections should be roughly equivalent to what would be the introduction to this section in the grammar.
Morphophonological Processes
Consonant mutation
(text)
Reduplication
(text)
Vowel hiatus (word internal)
(text)
Nominal Morphology
Here there should be basic descriptions of noun classes (how many?, etc.) and examples of how they are determined based on modifiers, determiners, etc.
Noun classes and number
Compounds Should this actually be called "compounds"? These seem more like using measure words to quantify amounts of mass nouns. Faytak 18:42, 2 November 2012 (UTC)
Nominal Modifiers
Determiners and Demonstratives
Determiners and Demonstratives
Verbal Morphology
Agreement
Inflectional Verbal Morphology
Tense and aspect
Tense (and aspect) Paradigm Table
Derivational morphology
Derivational Verbal Morphology
Syntax
Word order
main clause word order and pronominalization
Verb phrases
Valence patterns and alignment
Copular clauses and other copula-like things
Sentences with sound files Ignore these for now, I will relocate them. -- Oana 136.152.188.149 20:36, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
Noun phrases
Main article: Noun Phrases
Adjectives and Adverbs
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
Mood
Subordination
There are several types of clausal subordination in Sereer:
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
