Academic literature on the topic 'Chichewa language'

This article reviews the Oxford Chichewa-English/English-Chichewa Dictionary compiled by Steven Paas, published in 2016 by Oxford University Press in Cape Town. Upon a review of the dictionary, a number of issues arise. The dictionary's significance rests in its use as reference material for language learners, its semantic precision and the relevance with which translation and other disciplines treat it. Regardless of its wide coverage of the Chichewa and English lexicons, the dictionary has a number of flaws which are misleading and confusing for the dictionary's users. Such errors include ambiguity over dictionary type, inclusion of proper nouns as lexical entries, lack of detailed grammatical information and silence on morphological typology among others. This paper, therefore, concludes that the dictionary leaves a lot to be desired and recommends that the next edition of the dictionary take into account the highlighted issues.

This paper presents preliminary results of a phonetic and phonological study of the Ntcheu dialect of Chichewa spoken by Al Mtenje (one of the co-authors). This study confirms Kanerva's (1990) work on Nkhotakota Chichewa showing that phonological re-phrasing is the primary cue to information structure in this language. It expands on Kanerva's work in several ways. First, we show that focus phrasing has intonational correlates, namely, the manipulation of downdrift and pause. Further, we show that there is a correlation between pitch prominence and discourse prominence at the left and right periphery which conditions dislocation to these positions. Finally, we show that focus and syntax are not the only factors which condition phonological phrasing in Chichewa.

The data for three children learning Chichewa as their first language between the ages of 1.0 and 2.6 were analyzed to identify and describe the patterns of development of tone, morpho-syntax and semantics in the acquisition of negation. Not one of the subcategories of negation was completely mastered by 2.6; in four subcategories the tone patterns were acquired, with incomplete morphology; in no case was the morpho-syntax acquired without the tone. The results for first langauge acquisition are compared with previous results for bilingual and second language acquisition of Chichewa. The implications of these data for the identification of universals in language acquisition are discussed, as are the implications for phonological theory.

AbstractIn Bantu languages such as Chichewa or Herero, locatives can function as subjects and show noun class agreement (in class 16, 17 or 18) with predicates and modifiers. In contrast, (preverbal) locatives in Sotho-Tswana and Nguni have been analysed as prepositional adjuncts, which cannot agree. Our paper compares locatives in Kinyarwanda (JD61) with locatives in these other Bantu languages and demonstrates that the Kinyarwanda locative system is essentially of the Chichewa/Herero type. We show that Kinyarwanda locatives are nominal in nature, can act as subjects, and agree with predicates and modifiers. However, even though Kinyarwanda has four locative noun classes (16, 17, 18 and 25), there is only one locative agreement marker (class 16ha-), which indiscriminately appears with all locatives, regardless of their noun class. We explain this fact by arguing that noun class features in Kinyarwanda do not participate in locative agreement; instead, the invariant class 16 marker expresses agreement with a generic feature [location] associated with all locatives. We offer a syntactic analysis of this peculiar aspect of Kinyarwanda locative agreement, and we propose a parameter that accounts for the relevant difference between Kinyarwanda and Chichewa/Herero-type Bantu languages.