Certificación JAS (Japanese Agriculture Standards)

In this section I present a brief grammatical description of the Wolof language in order to understand the relevant data.

5.1.1 Noun classes

Determiners in Wolof consist of a noun class prefix and a diexis marker (Boilat 1858, Diagne 1971, Diouf 2009, Ngom 2002, Faye 2012). The noun class prefixes are presented in Table 13.

Singular Plural b y k ñ s (s) l (j) m j w g

Table 13: noun classes in Wolof

The b-class is the default class. The k-class is the human-class and corresponds to the plural ñ-class. Almost all other classes correspond to the y-class. Babou and Loporcaro (2016) argue that there are two more plural classes, namely another j-class and an s-class, which are not related to the singular j- and s-class. These classes denote groups, as is shown in example (130) and are rather rare in their use. Due to their rarity, they are listed between brackets in the table.

71 130) sëriñ s-i ñëw na-ñu

healer CL.PL-DEF.PROX arrive FIN-3PL/FIN.3SG

‘The healers have arrived.’ (ex. 31 from Babou & Loporcaro 2016)11

The determiners in Wolof are formed by combining a noun class with a deixis marker. The deixis comes in four forms: -a, -i, –ii and -u. Thus, ba would correspond to ‘that one over there’, bi to ‘this one’ or the unmarked form, bii to ‘this one right here’, while bu is neutral for space and time (Nouguier-Voisin 2002).

5.1.2 Verbal inflection and information structure

The canon word order in Wolof is SVO. Verbs are usually not suffixed for tense, aspect and mood marking. This is expressed by pre-verbal elements.

There are a couple of suffixes that verbs can take, one subset of these are valency changing suffixes (Church 1981, Nouguier-Voisin 2002, Creissels & Nouguier-Voisin 2004). The different valency changing operations are given in Table 2.

valency marker

middle -u

causative -e, -al, -le, -lu, -loo

applicative -e, -al

co-participation -e, -oo, -ante, -andoo, -aale

antipassive -e

possessive -le

Table 14: verbal suffixes for Wolof (reprinted from Creissels & Nouguier-Voisin 2004:2)

The imperative is denoted by the suffixes –ul for singular and –leen for plural.

Related to the conditional are the suffixes -ee and –oon. The marker –oon marks the past tense and is used in counterfactual conditionals, while –ee has had different analyses (see Section 5.4.2).

A salient feature of Wolof is that it has a rich array of focus constructions. These are examplefied in examples (131a-c).

131a) Maa-y lekk jën 1SG:SFOC-IPFV eat fish 'I eat fish' (subject focus) b) Dama-y lekk jën 1SG:VFOC-IPFV eat fish 'I eat fish' (verb focus)

c) Jën laa-y lekk

fish 1SG:OFOC-IPFV eat 'I eat fish' (object focus)

(ex. 18, 19 and 20 from Mc Laughlin 2004:247)

As can be seen in examples (131a-c) that a different focus marker is used depending on which constituent of the sentence is the most prominent. The focus marker is inflected for person and can take the imperfective marker –y. The paradigms are presented in Table 15. A more complete overview of the Wolof information structure can be found in Robert (1989).

11 _{There are two ways to spell the verb for ‘come’: ñów and ñëw. Since I use the form ñëw, I have adjusted Babou and Loporcaro’s (2016)} example for consistency.

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subject focus verb focus object focus

1sg maa dama laa

2sg yaa danga nga

3sg moo dafa la

1pl noo danu lanu

2pl yeena dangeen ngeen

3pl ñoo dañu lañu

Table 15: focus markers in Wolof

The subject focus markers can be combined with ngi to form the progressive aspect. The perfective aspect is marked with a postverbal clitic which agrees in number with the subject; its paradigm is given in Table 16. naa 1sg.pfv nga 2sg.pfv na 3sg.pfv nanu 1pl.pfv ngeen 2pl.pfv nañu 3pl.pfv

Table 16: the perfective clitic in Wolof. 5.1.3 Negation

The negation in Wolof is denoted by -u. The negation can be suffixed to the verb, in which case a u- form is suffixed to the verb. The paradigm is presented in Table 17.

form gloss -u:ma neg:1sg -u:loo neg:2sg -u:l neg:3sg -u:nu neg:1pl -u:leen neg:2pl -u:ñu neg:3pl

Table 17: the verbal suffixes for negation in Wolof.

The use of the negation is exemplified in (132), where the verb am ‘have’ is suffixed with –uma ‘NEG:1SG’to form amuma ‘I don’t have’.

132) Amuma xaalis.

am-u:ma xaalis

have-NEG:1SG money

‘I have no money.’ (elicitation A 07:25)

When used in an imperfective, the negation takes the form bul or bu ‘don’t’.

The negation –u can be combined imperfective marker d- to form du ‘to not be’, which can be used in a negative correlative structure, du… du ‘neither… nor’.

133) Du Omar du Jean demul.

du Omar du Jean dem-u:l

NEG Omar NEG Jean go-NEG:3SG

73 For a more extensive grammatical overview, see Diagne (1971) and Diouf (2009) among others. In the next section I describe coordinators in Wolof.