Thera Marie Crane

Biographic Data

ID5889884
NAMEThera Marie Crane
GIVEN NAMESThera Marie
FAMILY NAMECrane
SIGNATURECRANE T M
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Helsinki
ORCID0000-0003-2142-960X
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS10
TOTAL CITATIONS0
AUTHOR COUNT10
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2012
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX0

  • Auxiliary verb constructions in Southern Bantu

    Open AccessThera Marie Crane, Hannah Gibson et al.ARTICLELinguistic Typology2026

    This article develops the first systematic comparative study of auxiliaries in Southern Bantu, delineating their salient properties. Southern Bantu languages are reported to have large auxiliary inventories, with sixty or more auxiliaries documented for some languages. Auxiliary functions go beyond tense, aspect, mood, and polarity to express a variety of adverbial and other meanings. Auxiliary constructions take three main patterns of complement…

  • What can be said

    Open AccessThera Marie Crane, Remah Lubambo et al.ARTICLEStudies in Language2025

    We employ a cluster approach to explore the comparative semantic maps of several markers of modal possibility – the “potential” prefix nga ‐ and expressions meaning, roughly, ‘know how to’ and ‘be able to’ – in four South African Nguni languages: isiNdebele, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Siswati. We also compare the Nguni results with results from Xitsonga, a closely related language outside of the Nguni clade. The languages exhibit cross-linguistic differe…

  • Doing things with grammar

    Open AccessMaria Khachaturyan, Erika Sandman et al.ARTICLEFunctions of Language2024

    This paper studies the way utterances project properties of the interactional context via the choice of grammatical indexicals. Our analysis is an original combination of existing theoretical developments including notions of grammatical indexicality ( Silverstein 1976 ), of the relational structure of indexical reference ( Hanks 2014 ) and of presupposition accommodation (von Fintel 2008 ; Heim 1982 ; Karttunen 1974 , among others). While Silver…

  • Looking for evidentiality (and mirativity) in Bantu

    Open AccessThera Marie CraneARTICLEStudies in African Linguistics2024

    Although Bantu languages are not known for having grammaticalized and obligatory systems of evidentiality, research is uncovering more and more evidential contrasts and evidential strategies, as well as expressions of related categories like mirativity. In this article, I describe, with examples from the literature and my own research, two domains in which I believe targeted investigations are likely to uncover additional examples of evidential a…

  • Introduction

    Thera Marie Crane, J Nichols et al.ARTICLELanguage Typology and Universals2021

    Actionality (also referred to by labels such as “lexical aspect” or “aktionsart”) is the semantic dimension that encodes the constituent phases and boundaries of situations. Despite its central role in aspectual interpretation, careful language-specific descriptions and typological surveys of actional systems have been rare thus far. In this introduction, we describe the steps that lead to the compilation of the present special issue. We discuss …

  • Notes on actionality in two Nguni languages of South Africa

    Open AccessThera Marie Crane, Bastian PersohnARTICLEStudies in African Linguistics2021

    This paper presents some key findings of studies of actionality and the verbal grammar–lexicon interface in two Nguni Bantu languages of South Africa, Xhosa and Southern Ndebele. We describe interactions between grammatical tense marking (and other sentential bounding elements) and lexical verb types, arguing for the salience of inchoative verbs, which lexically encode a resultant state, and, in particular, a sub-class of inchoative verbs, biphas…

  • Constituency, Imbrication, and the Interpretation of Change-of-State Verbs in isiNdebele

    Open AccessThera Marie Crane, Thera Crane et al.ARTICLEStudia Orientalia Electronica2020

    This paper describes the interplay of lexical and grammatical aspect with other grammatical phenomena in the interpretation of the aspectual suffix ‐ile (which we analyse as Perfective) in isiNdebele, a Nguni Bantu language spoken in South Africa. Crucial other phenomena include constituency-related factors such as the conjoint-disjoint distinction and (related) penultimate lengthening, along with morphophonological conditions that trigger differ…

  • Melodic tone in Totela TAM

    Thera Marie CraneARTICLEAfricana Linguistica2014

    Most Totela tense, aspect, and mood forms take one of three patterns of melodic H tones. In the first pattern, only lexical Hs are present. In the second, a melodic H surfaces on the first stem mora, barring interference from general tone constraints such as Meeussen’s Rule. In the third pattern, the melodic H surfaces on the penultimate mora of the stem. Melodic H assignment is also conditioned by prohibitions against two adjacent Hs in the outp…

  • Resultatives, progressives, statives, and relevance

    Open AccessThera Marie CraneARTICLELingua2013References: 2

  • Ile and the pragmatic pathways of the resultative in Bantu Botatwe

    Thera Marie CraneARTICLEAfricana Linguistica2012

    Le suffixe -ile, commun dans les langues bantu, présente dans de nombreuses langues et particulièrement dans les langues du groupe appelé Bantu Botatwe, des problèmes interprétatifs complexes. Ces dernières langues, tout en montrant que le suffixe a suivi une trajectoire de grammaticalisation assez commune, allant du résultatif à l’antérieur, au perfectif ou au passé simple, montrent aussi que le suffixe y assume de nombreuses fonctions dans la s…