LFG and African languages

Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) as a formal, constraint-based grammatical theory has been used to analyze various languages around the world since the 1970s. These analyses comprise grammatical descriptions, grammatical formalizations, and computational implementations of the grammars developed using LFG. Africa is home to over 2000 languages and while not even half of these have established writing systems let alone descriptive grammars in any linguistic framework, quite a substantial number of these languages, especially many Bantu languages, have been analyzed using LFG. The list includes languages such as Swahili, Chiche\^wa, Chishona, Kichaga, Dagaare, Akan, Tigrinya, Wolof, Soso, Wan, Setswana, Yąg Dii, Malagasy, and Ndebele. In this chapter we first outline the major, salient linguistic features of African languages and then indicate how LFG has been used to analyze these salient features, covering topics such as the lexical integrity principle, applicative constructions, object asymmetries, agreement, reciprocal marking, locative inversion, serial verb construction, and focus marking phenomena. In the process of doing all this, the analyses in the chapter point to the major contributions of African languages to the development of LFG and, in turn, to the major contributions of LFG to the understanding of African language phenomena.