Abstract

Bura-Pabir (bwr) is a Chadic language spoken by around 551,000 speakers, primarily identifying as Bura-Pabir, in Northeastern Nigeria (Eberhard et al., 2025). Bura-Pabir has traditionally been analyzed for its morphosyntax (Hartmann & Zimmermann, 2012), but an equally interesting research avenue is available in a cross-linguistic comparison between English and Bura w/r/t how and under what conditions projective contents emerge. Through a typological comparison between these two languages and Paraguayan Guaraní using frequently attested triggers of projective contents and Family of Sentence variants in the spirit of Tonhauser et al. (2013), this investigation intends to demarcate convergences and divergences cross-linguistically in terms of Strong Contextual Felicity Constraints, projection, and Obligatory Local Effect.

Current Status

Based on previously collected FLEx data and a series of elicitation sessions with a native speaker of the Hyil Hawul dialect of Bura, Yakubu Bitrus, we have compiled a descriptive account of how 4 different classes of projective content and their triggers in Bura function across contextually-facilitatory and neutral contexts. These four triggers and their implicatures – the additive adverbial tsúwà, the expressive modifier bzə́bzá (‘damn, spoiled’), the demonstrative determiner ghèndá, and the factive verb sə́ndà – correlate with each Class of projective content proposed in Tonhauser et al. (2013). There is a rough harmony between the behavior we observed in these triggers and their contents for Bura and those attested in both English and Paraguayan Guaraní. We intend to collect more data with Yakubu and other speakers of Bura to further clarify the relationships between and across these languages.

External Links

View our preliminary work on Bura-Pabir, submitted in partial fulfillment of course requirements for LIN6826: Pragmatics. See also an early sketch of the tense, aspect, and mood system of Bura-Pabir, submitted in partial fulfillment of LIN6165: Field Methods.

References & Helpful Materials

Eberhard, D. M., Simons, G.F., & Fennig, C.D. (Eds.). (2025). Ethnologue: Languages of the World. (28th edition). SIL International. Online version: https://www.ethnologue.com/language/bwr/#visualizations

Hartmann, K., & Zimmermann, M. (2012). Focus marking in Bura: Semantic uniformity matches syntactic heterogeneity. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 30(4), 1061–1108. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-012-9174-4

Schuh, R. G., & Shalanguwa, E. (2010). Bura-English-Hausa Dictionary [PDF]. YUMPU. https://www.yumpu.com/s/gBoT7BXKialSHrB8

Tonhauser, J., Beaver, D., Roberts, C., & Simons, M. (2013). Toward a taxonomy of projective content. Language, 89(1), 66–109. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2013.0001