THE GRAMMAR OF CONATIVE ANIMAL CALLS: THE CASE OF TOGO-TEŊU KAN OF DOUROU (DOGON)

Abstract

This article offers the first systematic account of the grammar of conative animal calls (CACs) in the family of Dogon languages. After analyzing the meaning and form of 57 CACs in a Dogon variety spoken in the village of Dourou in Mali – the so-called Togo-Teŋu-Kan of Dourou – the authors conclude the following: the category of CACs in Togo-Teŋu Kan of Dourou largely complies with the crosslinguistic prototype of CACs in terms of its semantics, phonetics, morphology, and syntax and exhibits a considerable extent of extra-systematicity when compared to the lexical classes of the sentence grammar of this language. While these results generally corroborate the validity of the prototype of CACs posited in scholarship, the authors also propose a few, more or less fundamental, theoretical refinements and argue for a more prominent incorporation of the ecolinguistic evidence into the study of CACs.

Keywords

• dogon
• togo-teŋu kan
• conative animal calls
• interjections