Units

LaDisco : Center of research in linguistics

This Center groups linguists representing the main trends in contemporary linguistics. Research conducted within the Center is organised around four main axes: Language & Cognition, Morphology & Syntaxe, Semantics & Pragmatics and Sociolinguistics & Discours analysis.The first axis, Language & Cognition, highlights the cognitive correlate of linguistic phenomena, using empirical methods from cognitive sciences and experimental and clinical psychology. The Semantics and Pragmatics axis focuses on the interface between conventional meaning and its use in contexte, in close interaction with philosophy of language and mind, but also informed by experimental studies. The Morphology and Syntax axis encourages an in-depth study of linguistic structures, with approaches ranging from French linguistics to Chomskian generatistivism, and including cognitive linguistics. The last axis, Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis, studies language in its context of social use and is based on the analysis of corpora as well as on methods derived from sociology or ethnography.

Projetcs

Kalamu na wino: The Legacy of Arabic Script in Congo

As a result of contacts with Muslim merchants from the Swahili coast and Sudan in the second half of the 19th century, Arabic script was circulating in certain regions of the Congo (Maniema, Kisangani, Uele, etc.) even before the arrival of Europeans, and continued to do so throughout the colonial period, giving rise to a varied corpus in Arabic and Swahili in Arabic characters: correspondence, contracts, amulets, political treaties, books, etc. The aim of this project is to identify new documents that have remained in situ, to better understand their evolution over time and their circulation circuit, and to propose a linguistic analysis of Swahili documents in Arabic script produced in the Congo at the end of the 19th century.