Documentation and Description of the Badiaranke Language

FAIN: RZ-50500-05

University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA 94704-5940)
Larry M. Hyman (Project Director: February 2005 to February 2009)

The present project aims to produce a comprehensive description and documentation of Badiaranke, an endangered Atlantic language spoken at the intersection of Senegal, Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau.

Associated Products

Aspect, Modality and Tense in Badiaranke (Book)
Title: Aspect, Modality and Tense in Badiaranke
Author: Rebecca Cover
Abstract: Most formal analyses of the semantics of tense, aspect, and modality (TAM) have been developed on the basis of data from a small number of well-studied languages. In this dissertation, I describe and analyze the TAM system of Badiaranke, an Atlantic (Niger- Congo) language spoken in Senegal, Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau, which manifests several cross-linguistically unusual features. I develop a new semantic proposal for Badiaranke TAM that explains its distinctive properties while also building on the insights of earlier analyses of TAM in more commonly studied languages.
Year: 2010
Primary URL: http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~rebecca/RTC_dissertation.pdf
Primary URL Description: This dissertation resulted from extensive field work on Badiaranke, supported by the NEH Endangered Languages grant.
Secondary URL: http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~rebecca/cv.html
Secondary URL Description: Rebecca Cover's curriculum vitae, which shows other work on Badiaranke directly resulting from this support.
Type: Single author monograph

Modal aspects of Badiaranke aspect (Article)
Title: Modal aspects of Badiaranke aspect
Author: Rebecca Cover
Abstract: This paper argues that the semantics of imperfective aspect in Badiaranke (Atlantic, Niger-Congo) cannot receive an adequate explanation through previous approaches to aspect in other languages (e.g. [Klein, 1994] , [Bonomi, 1997] , [Smith, 1997] , [Cipria and Roberts, 2000] and [0150] ). The Badiaranke imperfective marks not only in-progress and habitually recurring eventualities (expected), but also future eventualities, eventualities in consequents of conditionals and counterfactuals, and epistemically probable eventualities (unexpected). Building on [Kratzer, 1981] and [Kratzer, 1991] analysis of modality, and on Portner’s (1998) modal analysis of the English progressive, the paper argues that the Badiaranke imperfective entails eventuality realization at some interval in the set of accessible worlds selected by some modal base and ordering source. Pragmatic and syntactic context set the modal base and ordering source, allowing for an underspecified semantics to cover all of the imperfective’s functions.
Year: 2011
Primary URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/lingua/
Primary URL Description: Lingua 121(8):1315-1343.
Secondary URL: http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~rebecca/RTC_Badiaranke_imperfective.pdf
Secondary URL Description: The text of the article.
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Lingua
Publisher: Elsevier

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