Aspects of the Grammar of Kuku (review)

This is an excellent overview of Kukú a Nilotic language of Sudan and Uganda. The Ethnologue (14th edn., ed. by Barbara Grimes, Dallas: SIL International, 2000) lists ‘Kuku’ as a dialect of Bari, but this work lays out substantial differences between Kukú and Bari, to which references are made at appropriate times. This work is more than a sketch (153 pages) though not a full reference grammar. The goal is to describe the patterns of Kukú without delving deeply into theoretical analysis.

In the ‘Introduction’, Cohen presents segmental and suprasegmental inventories, including two tonal processes. Kukú contrasts high, low, and falling tones; downstep is discussed later. He next has a chapter on segmental phonology, including ATR harmony, interaction of vowels, and glide deletion and formation, as well as consonantal alternations, many of which are related to syllable position (most strikingly, coda glottal stop is an allophone of /l/). In a brief prosody chapter, C discusses syllable structure, reduplication, and tonal phenomena that are prosodically conditioned.

C’s morphology chapter begins by discussing number, including a set of nouns for which a suffix marks singular forms but for which the plural is unmarked. Kukú nouns are either male or female in gender, and gender is marked on surrounding particles and modifiers such as demonstratives rather than on the noun itself. Verbs have more complex morphology. There are at least four different classes of verbs in Kukú distinguished by suffixes that they can bear, reduplication patterns, and tonal behavior. Here C discusses the ‘qualitative’ morpheme that plays an important diagnostic role in several other sections.

C includes a separate chapter on tense and aspect since this area includes elements of both morphology and syntax. Kukú has a variety of ways of marking TMA, including reduplication, tone, distribution of the qualitative morpheme, and various particles; only the last is used in Bare.

Discussion of tone is integrated within most chapters in the book, but C also includes a separate, more systematic, chapter on tone alone. Nouns have lexical tone, verbs may have tone as part of their aspect marking, and various causes of downstep are discussed. Most of the chapter is spent on phrasal tone changes.

The penultimate chapter on syntax is less detailed than previous chapters. Kukú is an SVO language; most modifiers follow the head, but not all. Of interest are two copula-type elements, one clearly an inflectable verb and one uninflectable, whose distributions partially overlap, clearly a candidate for more detailed study. Possession is of the ‘I am with X’ type, the particle kɔ apparently serving double duty as ‘and’ and ‘with’, though C does not state it this way.

Finally, a brief chapter on semantics discusses a definite/indefinite distinction.

C includes enough detail in most sections that scholars can easily find relevant data. One feature that should be followed by more authors is C’s marking of tone throughout the volume, not just in sections specifically discussing tone. He honestly includes phenomena he is unable to explain well. There is an index, and typos are few. An interlinear text would have improved the volume, but for the most part, this work is a good model for an atheoretical language description as well as a welcome documentation of a hitherto-undocumented language.