Prof. Dr. phil. Tom Güldemann

Prof. Güldemann dokumentiert und analysiert afrikanische Sprachen, insbesondere sogenannte Khoisan-Sprachen des südlichen Afrika und bedrohte Sprachen Zentralafrikas. Sein aktueller Schwerpunkt liegt auf der Erforschung von Nominalklassifikationssystemen (Genus- und Deklinationssysteme) in afrikanischen Sprachen sowie auf der Rekonstruktion von Sprachgeschichte und Bevölkerungskontakten durch linguistische Methoden. Er kombiniert Feldforschung, Sprachdokumentation und typologische Vergleiche, um zu verstehen, wie Sprachsysteme durch historische Kontakte und Migration geprägt werden. Seine Arbeiten ermöglichen es, frühe Bevölkerungsgeschichte südlicher und zentraler Afrika nachzuvollziehen und bedrohte Sprachen für die Wissenschaft zu bewahren.

🔒 Das System hat 672 mögliche Industrie-Partner gefunden — Firmen, Scores und Begründungen sind nur für eingeloggte Nutzer:innen sichtbar. Anmelden

• SFB 632: Prädikatszentrierte Fokustypen: Eine sample-basierte typologische Studie zu afrikanischen Sprachen (TP B7)

  Quelle ↗

  Förderer: DFG Sonderforschungsbereich Zeitraum: 09/2009 - 06/2011 Projektleitung: Prof. Dr. phil. Tom Güldemann

• Inheritance and contact in a language complex: the case of Taa varieties (Tuu family)

  Quelle ↗

  Förderer: DFG Sachbeihilfe Zeitraum: 01/2010 - 12/2013 Projektleitung: Prof. Dr. phil. Tom Güldemann

• Documentation of Bakola of Cameroon, Promotionsvorhaben Nadine Borchardt

  Quelle ↗

  Förderer: Volkswagen Stiftung Zeitraum: 03/2010 - 02/2013 Projektleitung: Prof. Dr. phil. Tom Güldemann

• The Macro-Sudan belt: towards identifying a linguistic area in northern sub-Saharan Africa

  2007

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · DOI

  It has been recognized for a long time that languages across a broad sub-Saharan belt from the western end of the continent to the escarpment of the Ethiopian Plateau in the east display certain linguistic affinities. At the same time, it has been difficult to identify precisely the nature and range of these affinities and to provide a plausible explanation for them.

• Quotative Indexes in African Languages. A Synchronic and Diachronic Survey

  2008

  DOI

  The book represents the results of a synchronic and diachronic cross-African survey of quotative indexes. These are linguistic expressions that signal in the ongoing discourse the presence of a quote (often called "direct reported speech"). For this purpose, 39 African languages were selected to represent the genealogical and geographical diversity of the continent. The study is based primarily on this language sample, in particular on the analysis of quotative indexes and related expressions from a text corpus of each sample language, but also includes a wide range of data from the published literature on other African as well as non- African languages. It is the first typological investigation of direct reported discourse of this magnitude in a large group of languages. The book may thus serve as a starting point of similar studies in other geographical areas or even with a global scope, as well as stimulate more detailed investigations of particular languages. The results of the African survey challenge several prevailing cross-linguistic generalizations regarding quotative indexes and reported discourse constructions as a whole, of which two are of particular interest. In the syntactic domain, where reported discourse has mostly been dealt with under so- called sentential complementation, the study supports the minority view that direct reported discourse and also a large portion of indirect reported discourse show hardly any evidence for the claim that the reported clause is a syntactic object complement of some matrix verb. With respect to grammaticalization, the work concludes that speech verbs are, against common belief, not a frequent source of quotatives, complementizers, and other related markers. Far more frequent sources are markers of similarity and manner; generic verbs of equation, inchoativity, and action; and pronominals referring to the quote or the speaker. Another more general conclusion of the study is that especially direct reported discourse can be fruitfully analyzed as part of a larger linguistic domain called "mimesis". This comprises expressions which represent a state of affairs by means of enactment/ performance rather than with the help of "canonical" linguistic signs and includes, besides reported discourse, world-referring bodily gestures, ideophone-like signs, and non-linguistic sound.