The associative construction and friends within Niger-Congo: When nouns unite

Call for Papers

The proposed workshop welcomes studies which illustrate the associative construction from any Niger-Congo language, from a historical-comparative or internal-reconstruction perspective. Of particular interest are those studies which discuss the evolution of forms or functions related to noun-noun constructions from Gur, Adamawa, Dogon, Ubangi, and other purported Niger-Congo branches with constructions parallel to identified associative constructions in other branches.

• WS Title: The associative construction and friends within Niger-Congo: When nouns unite Workshop at ICHL27, Santiago de Chile, 18-22 August 2025
• Workshop Type: in-person
• Organizers: Rebecca Paterson & Hugh Paterson III
• Abstract Deadline: October 18th
• Abstract Details: 800 words excluding references.
• Submission: Email PDF of abstracts to both r.paterson@princeton.edu and i@hp3.me with [ICHL27 w5] in the subject line.
• Note: Workshops are in most cases restricted to 6 papers; all other papers, if accepted, will be given as part of the ICHL general sessions. Should there be sufficient interest for an extended workshop (up to 12 papers), we will lobby the local organizers to permit this format.
• Workshop Website: https://hughandbecky.us/Becky-CV/project/ichl27-workshop-associative-construction
• Conference Website: https://ichl27santiago.cl
• PDF of Confrence abstract: PDF
• Publication: We are pursuing publication via edited volume post-workshop.

Goal & Questions

The [N Assoc N] construction sits at the apex of phonological, syntactic, and semantic evolution. The evolution of semantic uses (Evans 2012: 201) may affect clauses on different evolutionary trajectories from morpho-phonological sound changes. Therefore, the rather productive and promiscuous associative construction can become involved in independent evolutionary trajectories, e.g., phonological sound changes and semantic uses. The proposed workshop welcomes studies which illustrate the associative construction from any Niger-Congo language, from a historical-comparative or internal-reconstruction perspective. Of particular interest are those studies which discuss the evolution of forms or functions related to noun-noun constructions from Gur, Adamawa, Dogon, Ubangi, and other purported Niger-Congo branches with constructions parallel to identified associative constructions in other branches.

Background

The noun phrase is highly important to communication and is significant within historical-comparative work (e.g., wordlists). Noun phrase internal constituency and order is correlated with discourse pragmatics and sentence-level syntax in African languages (e.g., evolutionary syntax). We propose a workshop discussing and exploring the evolution of the range and forms of the associative construction both within and beyond the noun phrase.

Across Niger-Congo, the common Noun-Noun construction (also known as the associative construction per Welmers, 1963; a.k.a., connective, e.g., Meeussen 1967; connexive, e.g., Schadeberg 1995:176, and genitive, e.g., Benson 2020) has different interpretive meanings and invokes a variety of morpho-phonological forms. These forms in turn have various information-structure implications and communicative impacts. The associative construction has been discussed for certain sub-branches of Niger-Congo (e.g., Bantu, see Van de Velde 2013). The full range of functions of Welmers’ associative construction is little explored synchronically or diachronically.

While the syntax of the structure is consistently [N Assoc N], variations on the form of the associative marker itself are diverse as seen in examples 1a-e where the form can take the shape of a low vowel, a low tone, or in some languages a high tone. The canonical form for Bantu is proposed as AG-a; that is, a root -a which is preceded by a noun class agreement prefix (Meeussen 1967), and later Van de Velde (2013: 219). The exact morpho-phonological shape of the construction varies from language to language.

(1)

a. Kagulu [kki] (Bantu; Tanzania; Petzell 2008: 86, as cited in Van de Velde 2013: 217) m-eji g-a mu-nyu 6-water AG6-CON 3-salt ‘salt water’

b. Swahili [swa] (Bantu; Welmers 1963: 433) maji y-a chumvi {water AG-ASSOC salt } ‘salt water (water associated with salt)’

c. ut-Ma’in [gel] (Kainji; Nigeria; Paterson 2019: 264) swā d- ̀ =u-rwág nose AG5-ASSOC =C7-elephant ‘elephant trunk’ (ɘ̄r-swā ‘C5-nose’; ū-rwág ‘C7-elephant’)

d. Kwakum [kwu] (Bantu; Cameroon; Louagie et al. 2023) ndètɛ̀ ´ -kɛ̀ɛ̀ big CON -fish ‘the big fish’ (~ the being big/bigness of the fish)

e. Igbo [ibo] (Kwa; Nigeria; Welmers & Welmers 1969: 316) ímé ꜜíkó inside cup ‘inside of a cup’ (ímé ‘inside’; ìkó ‘cup’; ASSOC conveyed by tonal downstep)

Within the noun phrase, various semantic relationships or functions between the nouns are described for the associative construction including: possessive (example 3), part-whole (specific-general) (example 1-c.), material-composition (thing-compositional material) (example 2-a), person-place (person from a place), place of use, and time of use. At the clause level, these same constructions can convey semantics related to method, utility (material), location, time, and cause.

(2) Swahili [swa] (Bantu; Welmers 1963: 433) material: nyumba z-a mawe ‘houses made of stone’ material: alikifanya kw-a mti ‘he made it out of wood’ (3) Mumuye [mzm] (Adamawa; Shimizu 1983, as in Cahill 2000: 37) kìn + kpàǹtī –> kìń kpàǹtī chicken chief ‘chief’s chicken’

Confirmed Speakers

tbd

References

Benson, Peace. 2020. “A Description of Dzә (Jenjo) Nouns and Noun Phrases, an Adamawa Language of Northeastern Nigeria.” Asian and African Studies (Publication of Saint Petersburg State University) 12 (4): 490–504. https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu13.2020.402.

Cahill, Michael. 2000. “Tonal Associative Morphemes in Optimality Theory.” VARIA: Working Papers in Linguistics 53: 31–70. https://linguistics.osu.edu/research/pubs/papers/archive

Evans, V. 2010. “Evolution of Semantics.” In Concise Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language and Linguistics, edited by Alex Barber and Robert J. Stainton, 196–204. Oxford; Boston: Elsevier.

Louagie, Dana, Elisabeth Njantcho Kouagang, and Mark Van de Velde. 2023. “Kwakum Nominal Expressions: Constructional Exuberance.” Presented at the 56th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Athens, Greece.

Meeussen, Achille Emile. 1967. “Bantu Grammatical Reconstructions.” Africana Linguistica 3 (1): 79–121. https://doi.org/10.3406/aflin.1967.873.

Paterson, Rebecca Dow Smith. 2019. “Nominalization and Predication in U̱t-Maꞌin.” Doctoral dissertation, Eugene, Oregon: University of Oregon. Scholarsbank - University of Oregon. https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/25259.

Shimizu, Kiyoshi. 1983. The Zing Dialect of Mumuye: A Descriptive Grammar with a Mumuye-English Dictionary and an English-Mumuye Index. Hamburg: Helmut Buske.

Van De Velde, Mark. 2013. “The Bantu Connective Construction.” In The Genitive, edited by Anne Carlier and Jean-Christophe Verstraete, 217–52. Case and Grammatical Relations Across Languages 5. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/cagral.5.08vel.

Welmers, William E. 1963. “Associative a and ka in Niger-Congo.” Language 39 (3): 432–47. https://doi.org/10.2307/411125.

Welmers, William E., and Beatrice F. Welmers. 1969. “Noun Modifiers in Igbo.” International Journal of American Linguistics 35 (4): 315–22. https://doi.org/10.1086/465076.