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 centre and a non-prototypical periphery; and (b) primary emotive interjections exhibit the highest degree of canonicity and extra-systematicity, while the canonicity and extra-systematicity of secondary phatic interjections is lowest.

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 Kalahari Khoe appears to be undergoing serious reduction. This article discusses data on personal pronouns and nominal gender-number marking in four little-known Northern Tshwa varieties, including data from Tjwao, a severely endangered language spoken by fewer than ten individuals in western Zimbabwe. We analyse personal pronoun use, case distinctions and nominal marking, focussing on characterising features and commonalities shared across the cluster. Our findings show a high degree of uniformity within Northern Tshwa, and at the same time suggest a more complex nominal marking system than was previously assumed for varieties of the Eastern Kalahari Khoe subgroup.

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 grammaticalizationbased 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, definite past, stative and non-stative present. However, the senses of narrative remote past and pluperfect are typical of HĨ, while the senses of inclusive and resultative present perfect are only compatible with HA. When used as presents, HA is limited to affirmative contexts, whereas HĨ is restricted to negative contexts. The authors additionally demonstrate that the polysemy of each gram can be mapped by means of two sub-paths of the resultative path, i.e. the anterior and simultaneous paths. The two grams may therefore be located on the same stream on which HĨ occupies a more advanced position than HA, being thus a chronologically earlier construction. This grammaticalization-based entanglement of HĨ and HA is consistent with the situation found in other Khoe languages

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, phonetic, and morphological properties associated with CACs across languages. In light of the Tjwao data, a few refinements are also proposed. These concern the potential prevalence of whistles as the most common sounds not included in the International Phonetic Alphabet, the correlation of summonses with replication and repetitions as well as front and/or close vowels, the higher frequency of summonses and dispersals among all semantic types of CACs, and the lesser extent of monosemy than previously claimed.

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 Construction (JVC). While JVCs have synchronically been interpreted as Serial Verb Constructions (SVC), their origin and relationship with SVCs in the narrower sense as found in the Kx’a and Tuu families remain debated. The Kalahari Khoe languages Ts’ixa, Shua and Northern Tshwa spoken along the northeastern Kalahari Basin fringe present a convenient case study to expand the descriptive corpus on Khoe JVCs while addressing the limits of areal spread and contact influence. We show that all languages under consideration present JVCs with formal and functional properties corresponding to those found in other Kalahari Khoe languages, while also sharing features with SVCs as attested in the Kx’a and Tuu families. Both JVCs and SVCs contrast with conjoined predicates and are defined by single-eventhood. JVCs cover the same semantic domains found among SVCs of the Kx’a and Tuu families, can be subdivided into symmetrical and asymmetrical constructions, and show the same potential for lexicalization and grammaticalization, respectively.