Predication in Wolof (Atlantic, Niger-Congo)

This paper presents the constructions found in Wolof (Niger-Congo, Atlantic group) in the domain of predication, that is for expressing the various relationships between a predicate and its participants. Construction is understood here in the sense of Construction grammar (Goldberg 1995) as a form-meaning pairing. As a contribution to the CorTypo project (http://cortypo.huma-num.fr), this work is based on an annotated sound-indexed corpus from which the various constructions have been extracted and organized into a functional database. Following an inductive method, the different predications have been selected as ‘constructions’ when a meaning, regularly associated with specific coding means, could be defined and contrasted with that of other constructions. These different types of predications are called here ‘functions’. In the first section (Language information), general information about Wolof is given, then the various constructions pertaining to the functional domain of predication are listed, defined, contrasted and illustrated by examples (Functions in the domain of Predication for the language Wolof). These examples are extracted from a 30mn corpus made of three narrations (2015), one excerpt of a T.V. program (1985), and a conversation (2015). The few predications which are not found in this corpus linked to the database are given examples from other field data. The (phonological) official orthography for Wolof is used here. Glosses follow the standardized glossing rules elaborated within the project out of the Leipzig glossing rules. These first two parts are automatically generated from the online database, and appear as blocks. The synthesis then elaborates on the characterization of the domain of predication in Wolof, with a preliminary overview of the predicative inflections involved in those constructions.