Ethnolinguistic Lexical Documentation of the Southwestern Kalahari Khoe Languages (2016.04-2019.03)

About the Project

Project term: 2016.04–2019.03

Recent Khoisan linguistic studies have revealed that the lexicons of Southwestern Kalahari Khoe languages have a number of typologically unique or rare features in certain semantic domains, e.g., perception verbs and kinship terms (Nakagawa 2012, Ono 2011). Our ongoing field research is further discovering cross-linguistically uncommon features in other domains, such as folk taxonomy, eat-verbs, and temperature words. This project will provide Khoisan researchers of different scientific backgrounds (anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and zoology) with a platform for collaboration on new lexical documentation, which integrates up-to-date findings reported and discussed separately in different contexts.

Nakagawa, H. (2012) The importance of TASTE verbs in some Khoe languages, Linguistics, 50(2): 395-420. Ono, H. (2011) Two types of kinship categorization in Khoe. In Konig, C., Hieda, O., and Nakagawa, H. (eds.) Geographical Typology and Linguistic Areas, pp. 269-278. John Benjamin.

Hirosi NAKAGAWA, Project Coordinator (Professor, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)

For details, please see here.