Expressing Placement and Removal Events: A Look at Multilingual Casamance, Senegal

• Autores: Chelsea Krajcik
• Localización: The handbook of multilingualism, identity, and language endangerment in Africa / coord. por Alireza Korangy, Evgeniya Gutova, 2025, ISBN 9789819647293, págs. 605-634
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Crosslinguistic influences among L2 and bilingual speakers have shown patterns of convergence to a more semantically general system as compared to their monolingual counterparts (Berthele, On the use of PUT verbs by multilingual speakers of Romansh. In: Kopecka A, Narasimhan B (eds) Putting and taking events: a crosslinguistic perspective. John Benjamins Publishing, pp 145–165, 2012; Alferink and Gullberg, Bilingualism 17(01):23–37, 2014; Alferink, Dimensions of convergence in bilingual speech and gesture. PhD thesis, Lund University, Lund, 2015). However, this research is limited to the realities of Western speakers of standardized languages (Henrich et al., Behav Brain Sci 33(2–3):61–83, 2010); I expand this research to explore crosslinguistic influences among multilinguals residing in Senegal who use an average of six languages daily. This study looks at two of the speakers’ named languages, Senegalese French and Joola Kujireray, to compare the semantic encoding of placement and removal events, with the intentions of future research building upon this comparison and eventually investigating their full linguistic repertoires.

    This study provides a lexical semantic analysis of placement and removal events. Preliminary data showed French to use semantically general verb types, and Kujireray to use semantically specific postural verbs to express these events. Data were collected between 2015 and 2017 in the Lower Casamance region of Senegal: 18 multilingual speakers participated in a director-matcher variation of the Put Project stimuli and speech data were transcribed by a local team. Results revealed that speakers pattern similarly to L2 and bilingual speakers by dropping semantically specific information across languages. I discuss conceptual equivalence among multilingual speakers of typologically diverse repertoires and suggest a holistic approach when applying