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  • A paradigmatic grammar of Gĩkũyũ by John M. Mugane
  • Benji Wald
A paradigmatic grammar of Gĩkũyũ. By John M. Mugane. (Stanford monographs in African languages.) Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 1997. Pp. x, 180.

It should not be thought that a volume of this size attempts an exhaustive analysis of Gikuyu grammar. However, it is admirable for the amount of new information it does contain, along with its adequate sketch of the general features of Gikuyu, a major Kenyan Bantu language. A misstatement about the book is quickly passed by in the introduction, where Mugane, apparently daunted by some of the older extensive studies that preceded his work, states as his motivation ‘it is undisputed that language does change over time and the necessity for new grammars is always of paramount importance’ (1–2). His book has nothing to do with any changes that have taken place in Gikuyu between the time of those older studies and his work. Rather, a more apt statement would have been about changes that have taken place in the description of languages, especially with regard to particular features, e.g. syntax. Thus, Ch. 9, ‘The sentence’ (141–60), includes a number of observations on permissible and impermissible word orders that were not treated in those earlier works. Similarly, Ch. 6, ‘Synthetic compounds’ (71–92), treats the differential syntactic aspects of two Gikuyu word formation processes in a much more thorough way than they had been treated previously.

The general organization of the book’s ten chapters is fairly traditional, starting with a sketch of phonology and then on to the word, with the greatest amount of attention paid to the noun and noun phrase, Chs. 3–7 (22–92). M is quite innovative in discussing the agglutinative verb extensions of Gikuyu in the context of nominalizations, Ch. 5, ‘Deverbal noun extensions’ (59–71). In that context he takes advantage of the capacity of verbs to be nominalized to discuss the complexities of the verb extensional system before he discusses the morphology of verbs in the context of verb phrases. This allows him to address the ordering of extensions within the verb complex without treating the syntactic consequences of those extensions for nominal arguments allowed by those extensions. By discussing verb extensions in this context he remains true to his title of paradigmatic grammar and to his major interest in nominal morphology. Verb structure is then treated almost exclusively in terms of tense and aspect, Ch. 8 ‘Tense and aspect’ (118–41).

Each of the grammatical chapters (2–9) builds up a general problem, analyzes it extensively, and ends with a summary. The final chapter (161–74) deviates to introduce some aspects of Gikuyu culture by listing the vocabulary for a number of cultural domains, e.g. rites of passage, followed by some brief discussion and summary conclusions about the importance of viewing a language in its cultural context. The book concludes with a list of references and then an index of grammatical terms.

There are occasional weird editing errors for some morpheme glosses, e.g. ciũngũyũ is glossed as ‘9school’ in two successive examples but translated correctly as ‘fish’ (152), where the ‘9’ refers to the noun class of ‘school’ (but not ‘fish’). Such errors seem to be characteristic of the series in which this volume appears but are more the exception than the rule and are generally detectable and correctable by the alert reader. Less easily recovered is that the noun class of ciũngũyũ is ‘8’, indicating that it is the plural, not the singular, form of ‘fish’.

M’s book is a welcome addition to studies of Gikuyu grammar. It does not replace the earlier comprehensive studies but supplements them. In many instances where M shows particular interest in morphological or syntactic details, his book goes well beyond the earlier more comprehensive studies. [End Page 857]

Benji Wald
University of California, Los Angeles
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