Admire Phiri

• Stellenbosch University

Hunting gestures, i.e., gestures used to avoid scaring away prey or raising the attention of predators, are a central part of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of many foragers. These gestures have been documented for several groups in Southern Africa. This article is dedicated to such gestures, specifically those used by the speakers of a moribund Eas...

The present article analyzes the meaning and form of onomatopoeias in Tjwao, a Khoe-Kwadi (Kalahari Khoe) language. Making use of a prototype approach to categorization, a corpus of 113 onomatopoeic lexemes were tested for their compliance with the semantic, phonetic, and morphological features associated with the prototype of onomatopoeias in scho...

Background While the human oral microbiome is known to play an important role in systemic health, its average composition and diversity patterns are still poorly understood. To gain better insights into the general composition of the microbiome on a global scale, the characterization of microbiomes from a broad range of populations, including non-i...

Multiverbal predicates constitute a defining feature of the Kalahari Basin linguistic area of southern Africa encompassing the Kx'a, Tuu, and Khoe-Kwadi language families. Here, we focus on a complex predicate type restricted to the Khoe-Kwadi family's Khoe branch which involves a linker morpheme and is thus referred to as Juncture-Verb Constructio...

This article concludes the special issue of Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus dedicated to the diachrony of Serial Verb Constructions. The authors of the ten contributions included in the volume discuss the most important results of their studies and suggest the possible lines for future research.

The present article is dedicated to conative animal calls (CACs) in a Kalahari Khoe language, Tjwao. By using a prototype approach to categorization, the authors test the Tjwao CACs for their compliance with the prototype of CACs posited recently in scholarly literature. The authors conclude that Tjwao CACs largely conform to the pragma-semantic, p...

The present paper provides a systematic description of interjections in a moribund Eastern Kalahari Khoe language – Tjwao. After analysing original evidence within a prototype-driven approach, the authors conclude the following: (a) in Tjwao, the interjectional lexical class constitutes an internally diverse category confined between the canonical...

Languages of the Khoe family have a complex pronominal system that distinguishes three categories each for person, gender, and number. However, while languages of the Khoekhoe branch and the western subgroup of Kalahari Khoe obligatorily or optionally mark nouns and nominal classifiers for gender and number, the nominal marking system in eastern Ka...

The present paper offers an analysis of the TAM semantics of the HĨ and the HA gram(matical construction)s in Tjwao within the cognitive and grammaticalization-based model of dynamic maps and streams. The authors show that, albeit similar, the ranges of meanings of the two grams differ. The grams share the senses of experiential present perfect, de...

The article discusses consonant assimilation on isiNdebele nouns and examines that within the parameters of the Distinctive Feature approach. The main submission in this study is that consonant assimilation is local, homorganic and that it is found in the construction of class 9 and class 10 nouns. The terminal alveolar nasal consonant [n] of class...