Sereer Grammar
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.
| 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.
| 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).
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)
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.
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
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
Adpositions
Negation
Mood
Subordination
Texts
File:121011G 067 Sereer time anecdote.wav
Other Pages
- MediaWiki Handbook - Bari grammar (old main page) - Recordings and transcriptions (Bari) - Bari lexicon
