Abstract:
This article is guided by the following question: How is water
conceptualised by Wolof speakers in Senegal? In the analysis of
our corpus, we detected four structurally different ways of classifying or differentiating types of water in Wolof: a) different lexemes,
b) genitive construction in Wolof, c) relative construction in which
the head ndox (water) is linked to a verb by the mu form, formally
composed of the classifier of ndox, m- and a linker expressing the
relative, -u, and d) qualifying water by placing it as the subject of
a verbal phrase. In what follows, we will justify the inclusion of
each type, give examples of each classification, explain the use
(regarding our corpus) and also discussthe underlying imaginaries.
Keywords: Wolof, structural linguistics, Senegal, water, imaginaries