Abstract
Abstract
The relationship between the Songhay and Mande language families has fascinated West Africanists. The typological
similarities run deep, but the respective lexicons are noncognate. I focus here on a typological rarity, a bidirectional case
marker (BCM), namely Proto-Songhay *nà and its descendants, and argue that it was most likely borrowed from Mande as part of the
adoption by Songhay of the equally typologically rare Mande-type S(‑infl)‑O‑V‑X syntax, which reduces to S‑O‑V‑X when there is no
post-subject inflectional morpheme (predicative marker). Apparently Songhay had little choice but to borrow the morpheme on the
grounds that it did not previously possess the S(‑infl)‑O‑V‑X construction of which it is a key component, especially since a
buffer between S and O prevents real-time mis-parsing of two adjacent NPs as possessor-possessum. The medial (‘caught in the
middle’) position of the morpheme in the S‑BCM‑O sequence favored the borrowing, in spite of its abstract relational function
which in some theoretical models should block borrowing.
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
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