Tom Güldemann
Biographic Data
| ID | 164278 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tom Güldemann |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tom |
| FAMILY NAME | Güldemann |
| SIGNATURE | GÜLDEMANN T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 27 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Towards a phonological typology of the Kalahari Basin Area languages
This article reports some results of the first large-scale, comprehensive survey of the phonological systems of the Khoisan languages of the Kalahari Basin Area. These languages are famous for their large sets of click phonemes, a typologically rare characteristic otherwise found only in a limited number of languages worldwide. They are also unique because the click phonemes carry a high functional load in terms of phonemic and lexical distinctio…
Restructured Niger-Congo gender systems as another type of concurrent nominal classification
Recent research looks increasingly at languages with more than one system of nominal classification and first systematic typological assessments of so-called “concurrent noun classification” exist with a focus on cases involving classifiers and gender. We elaborate on this work by dealing with Niger-Congo languages that have restructured their inherited noun classification in a particular way. The inherited system entailing a strong parallelism b…
The two concurrent gender systems of Mba
This paper describes the gender system of the Ubangi language Mba, which can be characterized by the co-existence of two different classification systems. The ‘formal agreement’ system is tightly bound with the nominal deriflection system, while the ‘semantic agreement’ system, by contrast, emanates from a tripartite distinction in the language made between masculine humans, other animates, and inanimates. Whereas formal agreement is manifested o…
The gender system of Longuda
This article describes the gender system of Longuda. Longuda class marking is alliterative and does not distinguish between nominal form and agreement marking. While it thus appears to be a prototypical example of a traditional Niger-Congo “noun-class” system, this identity of gender encoding makes it look morpho-syntactic rather than lexical. This points to a formerly independent status of the exponents of nominal classification, which is simila…
The gender system of Khoekhoegowab
According to traditional analysis, Khoekhoe(gowab) makes a tripartite distinction between masculine, feminine, and common gender. Based on a statistical analysis of the comprehensive dictionary by Haacke and Eiseb and the first author’s status as a native speaker, the present paper offers new insights into the gender system of Khoekhoe. This concerns in particular the gender specification across the lexicon, including the status of transnumeral n…
More diversity enGendered by African languages: An introduction
We give an overview of current research questions pursued in connection with an ongoing project on nominal classification systems in Africa, with a particular focus on Niger-Congo. We first introduce our cross-linguistically applicable methodological approach which provides new insights into the design of a range of gender systems on the continent. We then apply these ideas to the “noun class” systems of Niger-Congo. We focus on non-canonical phe…
The Language of Hunter-Gatherers
Hunter-gatherers are often portrayed as 'others' standing outside the main trajectory of human social evolution. But even after eleven millennia of agriculture and two centuries of widespread industrialization, hunter-gatherer societies continue to exist. This volume, using the lens of language, offers us a window into the inner workings of twenty-first-century hunter-gatherer societies - how they survive and how they interface with societies tha…
The *Baakaa and Other Puzzles: Foraging and Food-Producing Peoples in the Western Central African Rainforest
While Baka and Yaka, two large, neighboring forager groups in the Central African Rainforest, underwent language shift involving distinct farming populations of the Mundu-Baka and Bantu family, respectively, they share many other traits and are assumed to descend from a common *Baakaa ancestor. We argue against the hypothesis that this group migrated to its wider Inter-Ubangi-Sangha location alongside food-producers. More plausibly, it had alread…
Asian Crop Dispersal in Africa and Late Holocene Human Adaptation to Tropical Environments
Occupation of the humid tropics by Late Holocene food producers depended on the use of vegetative agricultural systems. A small number of vegetative crops from the Americas and Asia have come to dominate tropical agriculture globally in these warm and humid environments, due to their ability to provide reliable food output with low labour inputs, as well as their suitability to these environments. The prehistoric arrival in Africa of Southeast As…
Genetic structure and sex‐biased gene flow in the history of southern African populations
OBJECTIVES: We investigated the genetic history of southern African populations with a special focus on their paternal history. We reexamined previous claims that the Y-chromosome haplogroup E1b1b (E-M293) was brought to southern Africa by pastoralists from eastern Africa, and investigated patterns of sex-biased gene flow in southern Africa. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We analyzed previously published complete mtDNA genome sequences and ∼900 kb of NRY…
Casting a Wider Net over Nǁng: The Older Archival Resources
Nǁng is a moribund language complex that is a member of the Tuu family and used to be spoken widely across the southern portion of the Kalahari in the north of South Africa. While its modern linguistic remnants have been studied intensively, there are nevertheless many gaps in our knowledge about Nǁng. This article surveys the older records that began to be collected in the second half of the nineteenth century, arguing that these can inform our …
Maximal backgrounding = focus without (necessary) focus encoding
Based on data from a range of geographically and genealogically diverse African languages this article describes a little recognized strategy for expressing focus. It is based on marking all material of an utterance as background except for the single focus constituent. This kind of “maximal backgrounding” thus renders focus without overt focus marking, called accordingly “indirect focalization”. It is argued that the recognition of this strategy…
Beyond ‘Khoisan’: Historical relations in the Kalahari Basin
Greenberg’s (1954) concept of a ‘Khoisan’ language family, while heartily embraced by non-specialists, has been harshly criticized by linguists working on these languages. Evidence for Greenberg's hypothesis has proved to be seriously insufficient and little progress has been made in the intervening years in substantiating his claim by means of the standard comparative method. This volume goes beyond “Khoisan” in the linguistic sense by exploring…
Quantifying Geographical Determinants of Large-Scale Distributions of Linguistic Features
In the recent past the work on large-scale linguistic distributions across the globe has intensified considerably. Work on macro-areal relationships in Africa (Güldemann, 2010) suggests that the shape of convergence areas may be determined by climatic factors and geophysical features such as mountains, water bodies, coastlines, etc. Worldwide data is now available for geophysical features as well as linguistic features, including numeral systems …
Variation in Information Structure with Special Reference to Africa
Information structure has been one of the central topics of recent linguistic research. This review discusses a wide range of current approaches with particular reference to African languages, as these have been playing a crucial role in advancing our knowledge about the diversity of and recurring patterns in both meaning and form of information structural notions. We focus on cross-linguistic functional frameworks, the investigation of prosody, …
Unraveling the complex maternal history of Southern African Khoisan populations
The Khoisan populations of southern Africa are known to harbor some of the deepest‐rooting lineages of human mtDNA; however, their relationships are as yet poorly understood. Here, we report the results of analyses of complete mtDNA genome sequences from nearly 700 individuals representing 26 populations of southern Africa who speak diverse Khoisan and Bantu languages. Our data reveal a multilayered history of the indigenous populations of southe…
Methodology in Linguistic Prehistory
Intervocalic consonant epenthesis is used as a case study for investigating grammar change. An emergentist framework is adopted, whereby a simple learning mechanism transforms a phonetically-based sound change into a synchronic phonological process. A two-part model of such 'grammaticalizing' change is developed, along with a formal analysis of the necessary model properties. This work demonstrates that perception-based consonant loss could, in p…
Are There “Khoisan” Roots in Body-Part Vocabulary? On Linguistic Inheritance and Contact in the Kalahari Basin
Lexical evidence has played an important role in trying to establish a “Khoisan” language family. With respect to the southern African languages there is indeed a considerable amount of shared vocabulary across all three major established non-Bantu families subsumed under “Khoisan,” viz. Khoe-Kwadi, Kx’a, and Tuu. A historical reevaluation of this phenomenon is presented in a first comparative treatment of body-part vocabulary, including newly co…
Quotative Indexes in African Languages. A Synchronic and Diachronic Survey: A Synchronic and Diachronic Survey
The book represents the results of a synchronic and diachronic cross-African survey of quotative indexes. These are linguistic expressions that signal in the ongoing discourse the presence of a quote (often called "direct reported speech"). For this purpose, 39 African languages were selected to represent the genealogical and geographical diversity of the continent. The study is based primarily on this language sample, in particular on the analys…
A Historical Appraisal of Clicks: A Linguistic and Genetic Population Perspective
Clicks are often considered an exotic feature of languages, and the fact that certain African "Khoisan" groups share the use of clicks as consonants and exhibit deep genetic divergences has been argued to indicate that clicks trace back to an early common ancestral language ( Knight et al. 2003 ). Here, we review the linguistic evidence concerning the use of click sounds in languages and the genetic evidence concerning the relationships of Africa…
Reconstruction through ‘de-construction’: The marking of person, gender, and number in the Khoe family and Kwadi
Kwadi is a virtually unknown and probably extinct click language of southwestern Angola. It has thus far not been assigned conclusively to any genealogical language group in Africa. Apart from being subsumed under the non-genealogical label ‘Khoisan’, the only concrete hypothesis has been to affiliate it with the Khoe family, also known as Central Khoisan. Based on my own analysis of the available linguistic data, the first systematic treatment t…
Present progressive vis-à-vis predication focus in Bantu: A verbal category between semantics and pragmatics
Predication focus — a category where the predicate or a part thereof constitutes (or is part of) the sentence focus — is frequently encoded across the Bantu family by inflectional or morphosyntactic means. This phenomenon is associated with another observation which is rather unexpected at first glance. There often exists a formal parallel between marking devices of predication focus on the one hand and of present progressive on the other. This i…
Reported discourse: A Meeting Ground for Different Linguistic Domains
Head-initial meets head-final nominal suffixes in eastern a southern Bantu from a historical perspective
Bantu languages in eastern and southern Africa possess nominal suffixes which serve to express locative relations or derive nominal stems. As these grammemes are final to their noun hosts, they are markedly distinct from canonic prefix morphology in Bantu nouns. Moreover, nominal syntagms are head-initial and canonic grammaticalization in this domain can be expected to yield prefixes. The elements under discussion are suffixes, yet they developed…
Unraveling the complex maternal history of Southern African Khoisan populations
The Khoisan populations of southern Africa are known to harbor some of the deepest‐rooting lineages of human mtDNA; however, their relationships are as yet poorly understood. Here, we report the results of analyses of complete mtDNA genome sequences from nearly 700 individuals representing 26 populations of southern Africa who speak diverse Khoisan and Bantu languages. Our data reveal a multilayered history of the indigenous populations of southe…
A Historical Appraisal of Clicks: A Linguistic and Genetic Population Perspective
Clicks are often considered an exotic feature of languages, and the fact that certain African "Khoisan" groups share the use of clicks as consonants and exhibit deep genetic divergences has been argued to indicate that clicks trace back to an early common ancestral language ( Knight et al. 2003 ). Here, we review the linguistic evidence concerning the use of click sounds in languages and the genetic evidence concerning the relationships of Africa…
Asian Crop Dispersal in Africa and Late Holocene Human Adaptation to Tropical Environments
Occupation of the humid tropics by Late Holocene food producers depended on the use of vegetative agricultural systems. A small number of vegetative crops from the Americas and Asia have come to dominate tropical agriculture globally in these warm and humid environments, due to their ability to provide reliable food output with low labour inputs, as well as their suitability to these environments. The prehistoric arrival in Africa of Southeast As…
The *Baakaa and Other Puzzles: Foraging and Food-Producing Peoples in the Western Central African Rainforest
While Baka and Yaka, two large, neighboring forager groups in the Central African Rainforest, underwent language shift involving distinct farming populations of the Mundu-Baka and Bantu family, respectively, they share many other traits and are assumed to descend from a common *Baakaa ancestor. We argue against the hypothesis that this group migrated to its wider Inter-Ubangi-Sangha location alongside food-producers. More plausibly, it had alread…
Genetic structure and sex‐biased gene flow in the history of southern African populations
OBJECTIVES: We investigated the genetic history of southern African populations with a special focus on their paternal history. We reexamined previous claims that the Y-chromosome haplogroup E1b1b (E-M293) was brought to southern Africa by pastoralists from eastern Africa, and investigated patterns of sex-biased gene flow in southern Africa. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We analyzed previously published complete mtDNA genome sequences and ∼900 kb of NRY…
Variation in Information Structure with Special Reference to Africa
Information structure has been one of the central topics of recent linguistic research. This review discusses a wide range of current approaches with particular reference to African languages, as these have been playing a crucial role in advancing our knowledge about the diversity of and recurring patterns in both meaning and form of information structural notions. We focus on cross-linguistic functional frameworks, the investigation of prosody, …
Head-initial meets head-final nominal suffixes in eastern a southern Bantu from a historical perspective
Bantu languages in eastern and southern Africa possess nominal suffixes which serve to express locative relations or derive nominal stems. As these grammemes are final to their noun hosts, they are markedly distinct from canonic prefix morphology in Bantu nouns. Moreover, nominal syntagms are head-initial and canonic grammaticalization in this domain can be expected to yield prefixes. The elements under discussion are suffixes, yet they developed…
Reported discourse: A Meeting Ground for Different Linguistic Domains
Present progressive vis-à-vis predication focus in Bantu: A verbal category between semantics and pragmatics
Predication focus — a category where the predicate or a part thereof constitutes (or is part of) the sentence focus — is frequently encoded across the Bantu family by inflectional or morphosyntactic means. This phenomenon is associated with another observation which is rather unexpected at first glance. There often exists a formal parallel between marking devices of predication focus on the one hand and of present progressive on the other. This i…
Reconstruction through ‘de-construction’: The marking of person, gender, and number in the Khoe family and Kwadi
Kwadi is a virtually unknown and probably extinct click language of southwestern Angola. It has thus far not been assigned conclusively to any genealogical language group in Africa. Apart from being subsumed under the non-genealogical label ‘Khoisan’, the only concrete hypothesis has been to affiliate it with the Khoe family, also known as Central Khoisan. Based on my own analysis of the available linguistic data, the first systematic treatment t…
Quotative Indexes in African Languages. A Synchronic and Diachronic Survey: A Synchronic and Diachronic Survey
The book represents the results of a synchronic and diachronic cross-African survey of quotative indexes. These are linguistic expressions that signal in the ongoing discourse the presence of a quote (often called "direct reported speech"). For this purpose, 39 African languages were selected to represent the genealogical and geographical diversity of the continent. The study is based primarily on this language sample, in particular on the analys…
A Historical Appraisal of Clicks: A Linguistic and Genetic Population Perspective
Clicks are often considered an exotic feature of languages, and the fact that certain African "Khoisan" groups share the use of clicks as consonants and exhibit deep genetic divergences has been argued to indicate that clicks trace back to an early common ancestral language ( Knight et al. 2003 ). Here, we review the linguistic evidence concerning the use of click sounds in languages and the genetic evidence concerning the relationships of Africa…
Methodology in Linguistic Prehistory
Intervocalic consonant epenthesis is used as a case study for investigating grammar change. An emergentist framework is adopted, whereby a simple learning mechanism transforms a phonetically-based sound change into a synchronic phonological process. A two-part model of such 'grammaticalizing' change is developed, along with a formal analysis of the necessary model properties. This work demonstrates that perception-based consonant loss could, in p…
Are There “Khoisan” Roots in Body-Part Vocabulary? On Linguistic Inheritance and Contact in the Kalahari Basin
Lexical evidence has played an important role in trying to establish a “Khoisan” language family. With respect to the southern African languages there is indeed a considerable amount of shared vocabulary across all three major established non-Bantu families subsumed under “Khoisan,” viz. Khoe-Kwadi, Kx’a, and Tuu. A historical reevaluation of this phenomenon is presented in a first comparative treatment of body-part vocabulary, including newly co…
Beyond ‘Khoisan’: Historical relations in the Kalahari Basin
Greenberg’s (1954) concept of a ‘Khoisan’ language family, while heartily embraced by non-specialists, has been harshly criticized by linguists working on these languages. Evidence for Greenberg's hypothesis has proved to be seriously insufficient and little progress has been made in the intervening years in substantiating his claim by means of the standard comparative method. This volume goes beyond “Khoisan” in the linguistic sense by exploring…
Quantifying Geographical Determinants of Large-Scale Distributions of Linguistic Features
In the recent past the work on large-scale linguistic distributions across the globe has intensified considerably. Work on macro-areal relationships in Africa (Güldemann, 2010) suggests that the shape of convergence areas may be determined by climatic factors and geophysical features such as mountains, water bodies, coastlines, etc. Worldwide data is now available for geophysical features as well as linguistic features, including numeral systems …
Variation in Information Structure with Special Reference to Africa
Information structure has been one of the central topics of recent linguistic research. This review discusses a wide range of current approaches with particular reference to African languages, as these have been playing a crucial role in advancing our knowledge about the diversity of and recurring patterns in both meaning and form of information structural notions. We focus on cross-linguistic functional frameworks, the investigation of prosody, …
Unraveling the complex maternal history of Southern African Khoisan populations
The Khoisan populations of southern Africa are known to harbor some of the deepest‐rooting lineages of human mtDNA; however, their relationships are as yet poorly understood. Here, we report the results of analyses of complete mtDNA genome sequences from nearly 700 individuals representing 26 populations of southern Africa who speak diverse Khoisan and Bantu languages. Our data reveal a multilayered history of the indigenous populations of southe…
Maximal backgrounding = focus without (necessary) focus encoding
Based on data from a range of geographically and genealogically diverse African languages this article describes a little recognized strategy for expressing focus. It is based on marking all material of an utterance as background except for the single focus constituent. This kind of “maximal backgrounding” thus renders focus without overt focus marking, called accordingly “indirect focalization”. It is argued that the recognition of this strategy…
Casting a Wider Net over Nǁng: The Older Archival Resources
Nǁng is a moribund language complex that is a member of the Tuu family and used to be spoken widely across the southern portion of the Kalahari in the north of South Africa. While its modern linguistic remnants have been studied intensively, there are nevertheless many gaps in our knowledge about Nǁng. This article surveys the older records that began to be collected in the second half of the nineteenth century, arguing that these can inform our …
Genetic structure and sex‐biased gene flow in the history of southern African populations
OBJECTIVES: We investigated the genetic history of southern African populations with a special focus on their paternal history. We reexamined previous claims that the Y-chromosome haplogroup E1b1b (E-M293) was brought to southern Africa by pastoralists from eastern Africa, and investigated patterns of sex-biased gene flow in southern Africa. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We analyzed previously published complete mtDNA genome sequences and ∼900 kb of NRY…
Asian Crop Dispersal in Africa and Late Holocene Human Adaptation to Tropical Environments
Occupation of the humid tropics by Late Holocene food producers depended on the use of vegetative agricultural systems. A small number of vegetative crops from the Americas and Asia have come to dominate tropical agriculture globally in these warm and humid environments, due to their ability to provide reliable food output with low labour inputs, as well as their suitability to these environments. The prehistoric arrival in Africa of Southeast As…
The Language of Hunter-Gatherers
Hunter-gatherers are often portrayed as 'others' standing outside the main trajectory of human social evolution. But even after eleven millennia of agriculture and two centuries of widespread industrialization, hunter-gatherer societies continue to exist. This volume, using the lens of language, offers us a window into the inner workings of twenty-first-century hunter-gatherer societies - how they survive and how they interface with societies tha…
The *Baakaa and Other Puzzles: Foraging and Food-Producing Peoples in the Western Central African Rainforest
While Baka and Yaka, two large, neighboring forager groups in the Central African Rainforest, underwent language shift involving distinct farming populations of the Mundu-Baka and Bantu family, respectively, they share many other traits and are assumed to descend from a common *Baakaa ancestor. We argue against the hypothesis that this group migrated to its wider Inter-Ubangi-Sangha location alongside food-producers. More plausibly, it had alread…
The two concurrent gender systems of Mba
This paper describes the gender system of the Ubangi language Mba, which can be characterized by the co-existence of two different classification systems. The ‘formal agreement’ system is tightly bound with the nominal deriflection system, while the ‘semantic agreement’ system, by contrast, emanates from a tripartite distinction in the language made between masculine humans, other animates, and inanimates. Whereas formal agreement is manifested o…
The gender system of Longuda
This article describes the gender system of Longuda. Longuda class marking is alliterative and does not distinguish between nominal form and agreement marking. While it thus appears to be a prototypical example of a traditional Niger-Congo “noun-class” system, this identity of gender encoding makes it look morpho-syntactic rather than lexical. This points to a formerly independent status of the exponents of nominal classification, which is simila…
The gender system of Khoekhoegowab
According to traditional analysis, Khoekhoe(gowab) makes a tripartite distinction between masculine, feminine, and common gender. Based on a statistical analysis of the comprehensive dictionary by Haacke and Eiseb and the first author’s status as a native speaker, the present paper offers new insights into the gender system of Khoekhoe. This concerns in particular the gender specification across the lexicon, including the status of transnumeral n…
More diversity enGendered by African languages: An introduction
We give an overview of current research questions pursued in connection with an ongoing project on nominal classification systems in Africa, with a particular focus on Niger-Congo. We first introduce our cross-linguistically applicable methodological approach which provides new insights into the design of a range of gender systems on the continent. We then apply these ideas to the “noun class” systems of Niger-Congo. We focus on non-canonical phe…
Restructured Niger-Congo gender systems as another type of concurrent nominal classification
Recent research looks increasingly at languages with more than one system of nominal classification and first systematic typological assessments of so-called “concurrent noun classification” exist with a focus on cases involving classifiers and gender. We elaborate on this work by dealing with Niger-Congo languages that have restructured their inherited noun classification in a particular way. The inherited system entailing a strong parallelism b…
Towards a phonological typology of the Kalahari Basin Area languages
This article reports some results of the first large-scale, comprehensive survey of the phonological systems of the Khoisan languages of the Kalahari Basin Area. These languages are famous for their large sets of click phonemes, a typologically rare characteristic otherwise found only in a limited number of languages worldwide. They are also unique because the click phonemes carry a high functional load in terms of phonemic and lexical distinctio…
Linguistics (22 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · History (14 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (11 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Artificial Intelligence (9 works) · Geography (9 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (9 works) · Language and cultural evolution (8 works)