THE LIMINAL SYSTEM OF BABANKI

Overview & Synopsis

Despite being essential tools in linguistic interaction across languages and cultures, interjections and liminal signs (non-word sounds with a communicative function) are most of the time left out of language descriptions, or at best confined to a short appendix, and consequently rather poorly documented. This trend has started to change in recent years (e.g., Ameka 1991, 1992a, b, Amha 2013, Dingemanse 2020a, 2021). This paper is meant to contribute toward the inflection of this trend by offering the first description of aspects of the liminal system of Babanki, a Grassfields language of the Ring sub-group in North-West Cameroon. This study is based mostly on the introspective knowledge of the first author, a native speaker of Babanki, supplemented by WhatsApp discussions with five other native speakers. Following Jakobson (1960), Ameka (1992a), and Dingemanse (2021), we classify the Babanki liminal signs in three types of semantico-pragmatic functions, namely, phatic, conative, and expressive. The use of clicks and various phonotactically odd structures in the liminal system implies that they are part of the phonological system of the language and should be included in its grammatical description. They clearly serve a different function from the contrastive sounds of the language, and consequently ought to be presented as a separate inventory.