Kisi

Abstract This chapter provides an overview of the Kisi language, a language of considerable interest to both typologists and arealists. It differs from a relatively complete grammar of the language (Childs 1995a) in that it is better able to situate Kisi within Mel, a perspective that was not possible with the state of scholarship at the time when the descriptive grammar was written. Kisi is seen as typologically rather different from its closest relatives in a number of significant ways. Kisi suffixes, rather than prefixes, its noun class markers, features a split predicate where much more is allowed between the two parts of the verb than in other languages, and features particles not found in other languages, and located, moreover, in unfamiliar positions. These divergences are best analysed as innovations rather than as a result of contact with the Mande languages by which Kisi is surrounded.