Ellen Contini-    Morava

My general area of interest is the relationship between the meanings of grammatical forms and discourse: what kinds of meanings do grammatical forms signal, and what kinds of messages do they convey? In the categories of traditional linguistics, this question falls somewhere between syntax, semantics and pragmatics. My theoretical orientation is both semiotic and "functionalist." This means that one explains the use of linguistic forms as a relation between their conventionalized meanings and the "pragmatic" context: socio-cultural rules of interpretation, general human psychological characteristics, etc.

Most of my work has been on Swahili, a Bantu language originally spoken along the East African coast, but now used as a second language in East and central Africa. Swahili reflects the cosmopolitan, maritime, syncretistic culture of its speakers. It has retained its Bantu grammatical structure while absorbing large numbers of loan words from genetically unrelated languages (Omani Arabic, Persian, various Indian languages, and more recently English). One thing I am looking at in my current work is the impact of these words (and the concepts they represent) on the indigenous system of noun classification.

Right now I am working on noun classification in Swahili, a project that involves both the grammar and the lexicon. In Swahili, all nouns are divided into 11 classes, each marked by a different prefix, and words relating to a noun have to "agree" with the class of the noun. This is similar to gender in French or Spanish, except that in Swahili there are 11 "genders" instead of just two. The questions I am looking at are: what are the semantic principles for grouping the nouns into classes, and what role does the system of grammatical agreement play in Swahili discourse? A larger question is, what "use" is grammatical noun classification, including gender? Does it help speakers make sense of the world? Does it provide an efficient means for expanding the lexicon? Does it help in discourse processing? All of the above? [To look at a paper of mine on this work in progress, click here .]

Specializations

Meanings and discourse functions of grammatical forms; pragmatics; linguistic theory and method; African linguistics (especially Bantu).

Courses

Theories of Language, Linguistic Field Methods, African Language Structures, Linguistics and Discourse, Seminar on Noun Categorization, Language and Culture, Language and Gender, Sociolinguistics.

Selected Publications

• 2004 - Cognitive and Communicative Approaches to Linguistic Analysis, ed. by Ellen Contini-Morava, Robert S. Kirsner, and Betsy Rodriguez-Bachiller. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
• 2002 - "(What) do noun class markers mean?" In Wallis Reid and Ricardo Otheguy (eds.), Signal, Meaning, and Message: Perspectives on Sign-Based Linguistics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 3-64.
• 2000 - Noun Class as Number in Swahili. In Between Grammar and Lexicon, ed. by Ellen Contini-Morava and Yishai Tobin. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
• 1997 - Swahili Phonology. In Phonologies of Asia and Africa, ed. by Alan Kaye. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
• 1996 - "Things" in a Noun Class Language: Semantic Functions of Grammatical Agreement in Swahili. In Towards a Calculus of Meaning: Studies in Markedness, Distinctive Features, and Deixis, ed. by Edna Andrews and Yishai Tobin. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
• 1995 - (with B. S. Goldberg, eds.). Meaning as Explanation: Advances in Linguistic Sign Theory. Berlin: Mouton-de-Guyter.
• 1994 - Noun Classification in Swahili. Publications of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia. Research Reports, Second Series.
• 1991 - Deictic Explicitness and Event Continuity in Swahili Discourse. Lingua 83:277-318.
• 1989 - Discourse Pragmatics and Semantic Categorization: The Case of Negation and Tense-aspect with Special Reference to Swahili. Berlin: Mouton-de-Gruyter.