Symposium organized with the support of the Fondation du Collège de France.
Symposium
The mapping of syntactic structures is a vast project of description and analysis which aims to map in great detail the internal architecture of sentence and phrase structures across languages. Certain African languages, with their system of explicit morphosyntactic markers for properties such as topicality and focus, but also for temporal, modal and aspectual properties, have made a decisive contribution to this line of research, with, for example, the detailed mapping of Gungbe, the Kwa language spoken in Benin (Aboh 2004). The symposium Syntactic Cartography and African Languages (in English) will attempt to take stock of some twenty years of cartographic studies on African languages, and to discuss possible developments in this line of research, which involves African linguistics in a context of General and Comparative Linguistics.