Publications

In this research article, a quantified look is taken at the metalexicographic endeavours of the past half century, starting in 1971. It is argued that the year 2021 represents a tipping point, and for that reason, when illustrations are needed in the article, those are preferably taken from the work of Sue Atkins, who passed away in 2021. It analyses the formation of the various continental lexicography associations, as well as their conferences ...

Pottery traditions reflect the socioeconomic framework of past cultures, while the spatial distribution of pottery indicates exchange patterns and interaction processes. Material and earth sciences are employed here to determine raw material sourcing, selection and processing. The Kongo kingdom, internationally renowned since the late fifteenth century, is one of the most famous precolonial states in Central Africa. Despite the large number of ...

While there was arguably a need for multi-authored, multi-volume, metalexicographic hand-books three decades ago — when the field of metalexicography was still ‘young’ — it is a bit puzzling to make sense of the current output-flurry in this field. Is it simply a matter of ‘every publisher trying to fill its shelves’? or is there really a need in the scientific community for more and (continuously) updated reference works? And once available, ...

This paper looks at whether, after two decades of corpus building for the Bantu languages, the time is ripe to begin using monitor corpora. As a proof-of-concept, the usefulness of a Lusoga monitor corpus for lexicographic purposes, in casu for the detection of neologisms, both in terms of new words and new meanings, is investigated and found useful.

This chapter introduces the notion of suffixal phrasemes to designate the semantically non-compositional complexes of suffixes which emerged across time and space in Bantu to renew morphology in several verbal derivation categories. It is shown that such verb derivational phrasemes can be reconstructed to different ancestral stages as far back as Proto-Bantu (PB) and possibly beyond. The oldest instance of such a suffixal phraseme in Bantu is ...

This book is about reconstructing the grammar of Proto-Bantu, the ancestral language at the origin of the African linguistic family commonly known as Bantu. It is about how to retrieve the phonology, the morphology and the syntax the earliest Bantu speakers used to communicate with each other. In §1, I explain how this book came about. In §2, I offer a short presentation of its contents. In §3, I reflect critically on a number of methodological ...

The dispersal of Bantu-speaking people from their ancestral homeland in the borderland between current-day Nigeria and Cameroon across most of Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa had a significant impact on the languages, cultures, and demography of autochthonous populations. Inversely, foragers and pastoralists also considerably contributed to the gene pool of Bantu-speaking communities, the speciation of their languages, and the evolution of ...

This paper provides an in‑depth description of reduplication of verbs, nouns, and other word categories in Lusoga, drawing on introspected and elicited data, along with data from dictionaries and corpus texts, as well as material presented in the literature in research by Larry Hyman. Our description focuses on phonological details like vowel length, as both shortening and lengthening processes are found, as well as similarities and differences ...

The North-Angolan Bantu language Kisikongo has a present tense (O-Rang- a; R=root) that is morphologically more marked than the future tense (O-R-a). We reconstruct how this typologically uncommon tense-marking feature came about by drawing on both historical and comparative evidence. Our diachronic corpus covers four centuries that can be subdivided in three periods, viz. (1) mid-17th, (2) late-19th/early-20th, and (3) late-20th/ early-21st ...