Professor of African Languages and Linguistics
Ph.D., Leiden University
- 342 Pugh Hall
- essegbey@ufl.edu
- 352.846.2431
- Homepage
- Curriculum Vitae
Office Hours — Fall 2023
- By appointment
Areas of Interest
My research interests include the description and documentation of endangered languages, syntax-semantics interface, the varieties of English spoken by people of African descent, and the influence of African languages on creoles. I work on the Kwa languages of West Africa, especially Gbe (i.e. Ewe, Gen, Aja and Fon), Akan, and Ghana-Togo Mountain (GTM) languages (Nyangbo and Animere). I also investigate the influence of the Gbe languages on Suriname creoles.
Selected Papers
- 2024 Towards a unified account of na in Akan. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 9(1)(with Galia Hatav) https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.10082
- 2024 Predication in African languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins (with Enoch O. Aboh).
- 2024 From greeting to injecting: the case of dó in Ewe. In Essegbey, James and Aboh, Enoch O. (eds.), Predication in African languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
- 2024 Moving from verbs to prepositions in Gbe. In Essegbey, James and Aboh, Enoch O. (eds.), Predication in African languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (With Aboh, Enoch O. and Ameka, Felix)
- 2024 Catching and classifying fishes among the Dwang. In Nassenstein, Nico, Alice Mitchell and Andrea Hollington (eds.), Anthropological Linguistics: Perspectives from Africa. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
- 2021 Documenting oral genres. In Akintunde Akinyemi & Toyin Falola (eds.), The Palgrave handbook of African oral traditions and folklore, (Chapter 8). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
- 2021 Celebrating 50 years of ACAL: Selected Papers from the 50th Annual Conference for African Linguistics. Berlin: Language Science Press. (With Akin Akinlabi, Laura J. Downing, Laura McPherson, Katie Franich, Lee Bickmore, Sharon Rose, Michael Cahill & Michael Diercks)
- 2020 Initial prominence and progressive vowel harmony in Tutrugbu. Phonological Data & Analysis (with Adam McCollum) https://phondata.org/index.php/pda/article/view/14
- 2020 Moving into and out of Sranan: multiple effects of contacts. In Norval Smith, Tonjes Veenstra & Enoch O. Aboh (eds.) Aspects of contact. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins (with Adrienne Bruyn)
- 2019 The grammar of verbs and their arguments: a cross-linguistic perspective Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe. (with Dalina Kallulli & Adam Bodomo).
- 2019 Cutting across the Gbe divide. In Essegbey, James & Kallulli Dalina & Bodomo, Adams (eds.), The grammar of verbs and their arguments: a cross-linguistic perspective, 85-114. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe
Courses Taught
- AKA 1130 Beginning Akan 1
- AKA 1131 Beginning Akan 2
- AKA 2200 Intermediate Akan 1
- AKA 2201 Intermediate Akan 2
- SST 2501 African Elements in the Americas
- SSA 4903 Africanisms in the Americas
- SSA 4930 Black Englishes
- SSA 4930 Methods of Language Documentation