Sereer Grammar

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This is the Wiki page for research on the Saalum dialect of Sereer, as conducted by the 2012-2013 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, the subject of this wiki is the Saalum dialect of Sereer, while most existing documentation being on the significantly different Siin dialect (MacLaughlin 1994, 2000, 2005).

Add more information here about 1) basic typological properties of Sereer
(2) and (3) taken care of Faytak 18:31, 2 November 2012 (UTC)


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 class presentations here.

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

Phonology

Main article: Phonological Inventory


Phonological Inventory

Consonants

A tentative 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
  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)      

Spectrograms and Audio Samples of Consonants

Vowels

A tentative 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.

Phonological Alternations

Phonological alternations in Sereer are characterized vastly differently depending on the portion of the word they occur in. On the one hand, Sereer has stems that are fairly invariant in size, almost exclusively alternating by way of morphologically determined consonant mutation of initial (or sometimes final) segments. On the other hand, affixes (and especially verbal suffixes) have phonologically determined allomorphs that alternate between the segmental shapes -VC and -C, seemingly motivated by an avoidance of overlong consonant clusters and hiatus. There is a trade-off in phonological content, then, between invariance in terms of shape (in stems, whose segments do change) and invariance in terms of segments (in affixes, whose shape does change).

Phonological Alternations

Phonotactics

(Text here, or perhaps all of the phonotactics page can simply be included in the main sketch? Note, though, that the phonotactics page should have examples)

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.

Stress

Loanword Phonology

Borrowed words show phonemes that are not normally present in Serer, like /y/ in [myr] 'wall' (Fr. mur), or /ʃ/ in [maʃin] 'machine, device' (Fr. machine).

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.

Nominal Morphology

Noun classes and number

Nominal Morphology

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

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) Who is "I"? Faytak 23:24, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Noun phrases

Word order in possessive constructions appears to be possessum-possessor, as seen in [muus ne no ndeɓ onge] 'a boy's cat' (040).

N-Adj order, as in [ino fop] 'all of us' (054), and [muus fodaɗaru] 'clumsy cat' (068)

Adjectives and Adverbs

Adjectives and Adverbs

Adpositions

Adpositions

Negation

Negation

Mood

Questions

Imperatives and Hortatives

Subordination

Relative Clauses

Texts

File:121011G 067 Sereer time anecdote.wav

Other Pages

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

Notes

Template:Reflist

References