Download a free copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader.This site on the Bole language derives from work supported by two US National Science Foundation Grants ("Bole Language: Grammar, Dictionary, and Texts", #BCS9905180, Russell G. Schuh, Principal Investigator and "The Chadic Languages of Yobe State, Nigeria", #BCS0111289, Russell G. Schuh, Principal Investigator). For Bole, this work wil ultimately result in a complete reference grammar, dictionary, and collection of texts with English translations. This page makes available some of the work completed under these grants. Click on the highlighted links to download these papers in PDF format. To download these files you nead Adobe Acrobat Reader. Download a free copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Segmental Phonology: (34 pages) Draft chapter describing the consonantal and vocalic systems of Bole. This chapter will probably be broken down into shorter chapters on specific aspects of phonology.
Consonants (new 4/25/04): (17 pages) Description of the consonant sounds of Bole, including consonant inventory, consonants with special distributional properties, and consonant alternations.
Vowels (new 4/29/04): (16 pages) Description of the vowel sounds of Bole, including vowel and diphthong inventory, vowel distribution, and vowel alternations.
Tonal Phonology (new 6/5/04): (35 pages) Description of the tonal inventory and tone rules, especially the rule of Low Tone Raising, which operates according to a combination of phonological, morphological, and syntactic conditions. Click here for a Table of Contents of the tone chapter.
Adjectives (new 4/22/04): (9 pages) Description of the morphology of adjectives, the syntax of noun phrases containing adjectives, and the use of adjectives as predicates and phrasal complements.
Ideophonic Adjectives (new 5/4/04): (10 pages) Description of a category (actually a set of categories) of words that have properties of both ideophones and adjectives.
Statives (new 4/24/04): Description of the morphology and syntax of expressions derived from verbs with meanings such as 'sitting', 'roasted', etc.
Pluractional Verbs (new 4/22/04): (12 pages) Description of the morphology of pluractional verbs (verbs indicating multiple action of any kind) and syntactic restrictions on cerain pluractional types.
Frozen Pluractionals (new 4/22/04): (9 pages) Description of the morphology of Bole verbs originally pluractional in form but no longer used in "simple" form, with a discussion on the historical evolution of Bole pluractional morphology.
Genitives (new 5/17/04): (18 pages) Description of the syntax and morphology of genitive phrases, with both nominal and pronominal "possessors" and phrases of special types such as those with kin terms.
Possessive and Agentive Phrases using an (new 5/7/04): (8 pages) Description of phrases headed by an 'one that has..., one that does...' (corresponding to Hausa mai) with a nominal or nominalized verbal complement.
The Syntax of Simplex Non-Verbal Clauses: (14 pages) Draft chapter describing the syntax of equational sentences of various types, locative sentences, existential sentences, presentative sentences, and "have" sentences. This will eventually be broken down into shorter chapters on the specific sentence types.
Equational and Identificational Sentences (new 5/12/04): (9 pages) Description of copular sentences with nouns, adjectives, numbers, or names as predicates. [This is a revision and expansion of part of "The Syntax of Non-Verbal Clauses".]
The Syntax of Simplex Verbal Clauses (new 5/4/04): (10 pages) Description of marking and ordering of nominal and adverbial constituents in simplex clauses that contain one verb.
Subjects (revised 4/22/04): (6 pages) Description of nominal and pronominal subjects, as well as indefinite and expletive subjects.
Objects, Direct and Indirect (revised 4/22/04): (8 pages) Description of nominal and pronominal objects. Of particular interest is the distinction between pronominal indirect objects, which are incorporated into an indirect object verb stem, and pronominal direct objects, which, though clitics, are not part of the verb stem per se.
Nominal Complements: Subjective and Objective Complements: (4 pages) Description of VP structures traditionally labeled "subjective complements" ('John feels good') and "objective complements" ('we elected John mayor").
Comparative Constructions (revised 4/22/04): (4 pages) Description of comparative structures, which Bole, like most African languages, expresses with verbs meaning "surpass", "be equal to", "be less than".
Locative Expressions: (7 pages) Description of the internal structure of locative constructions, including "true prepositions", nouns used to show locative relations, words meaning 'place', pro-locatives ('here', 'there', etc.), and some words that have special locative roles.
The files below are the complete text of Alhaji Maina Gimba's UCLA PhD dissertation, "Bole verb morphology" (2000). Gimba can be contacted at gimbaa2002@yahoo.com.
Table of Contents, Abstract, and other introductory sections
Chapter 2: Tones and Tone Rules
Chapter 4: Tense, Aspect, and Mood Forms
Chapter 7: Disappearing Morphemes
Chapter 8: The Totality and Additive Extensions
Chapter 10: Verbal Pluractionality
Chapter 11: Summary and Conclusion
Appendix 1: Pronouns and Pronoun Clitics
Appendix 3: Bole Consonants and Vowels
The papers here focus on Bole. See papers downloadable from Russell Schuh's site for more general descriptive and comparative papers that incorporate substantial amounts of Bole data.
"Substantive and anaphoric 'Thing' in Bole, with remarks on Hausa abu/abin" (with Alhaji Maina Gimba, 2000). Bole has two etymological related words that can be translated 'thing'. One is the concrete noun 'thing', the other is used in expressions literally translated as "he went out his thing", which have a sense of "he went out on his own, he went out with his own purpose in mind". We argue that his use of 'thing' comprises a true anaphor--it is bound to the subject of its clause--and has the semantic function of a middle voice. We compare anaphoric 'thing' to other Bole anaphors. Finally, we compare Bole anaphoric 'thing' to the parallel construction in Hausa. (Now published in slightly revised form in Harold Torrence (ed.), Papers in African Linguistics 1, pp. 90-122, UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics 6, Los Angeles: UCLA Department of Linguistics, 2001.)
"Sources of gemination and gemination as a morpheme in Bole" (2001). The was presented as a plenary paper at the 32nd Annual Conference on African Linguistics, UC Berkeley, March 2001 and will eventually appear in the conference proceedings. The paper demonstrates that although Bole has a plethora of lexical geminate consonants, nearly all of them can be credibly attributed to historical processes of assimilation, whether in Bole itself or in Bole's parent language. Nonetheless, modern Bole has lexical geminates and even morphemes which manifest themselves as a geminated consonant without an fully specified underlying form.
"The Metrics of a Bole Song Style, Kona" by Russell G. Schuh. This is a description and analysis of a Bole song. For more detailed information, pictures, text, and a sound file, click here.