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Ellen Contini-Morava

linguistic anthropologist

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 19, 2026
Entity authorityQ5364794 ↗
Source-derived summary

Ellen Contini-Morava (born 7 December 1948

) is an American anthropological linguist, interested in the meanings of linguistic forms, discourse analysis, functional linguistics and (noun) classification; in particular, in the relationship between lexicon and grammar. She specializes in Bantu languages in general, and Swahili in particular.

Education and career

Contini-Morava received her PhD from Columbia University in 1983 under William Diver and Erica Garcia. Contini-Morava is a professor emerita at the University of Virginia.

Books

Contini-Morava is the author of the book Discourse Pragmatics and Semantic Categorization: The Case of Negation and Tense-Aspect with Special Reference to Swahili (Mouton de Gruyter, 1989).

Her edited volumes include Between Grammar and Lexicon (edited with Yishai Tobin, John Benjamins, 2000) and Cognitive and Communicative Approaches to Linguistic Analysis (edited with Robert S. Kirsner and Betsy Rodríguez-Bachiller, John Benjamins, 2004).

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Ellen Contini-Morava” is linguistic anthropologist. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Ellen, Contini-Morava and linguistic, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1948, 1983, 1989, 2000—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1948-01-01. For this dossier, Ellen, Contini-Morava and linguistic is the immediate research focus.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5364794. VIAF identifies the subject as 110486319. The Library of Congress control number is n88159407. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1948, 1983, 1989 and 2000.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Ellen Contini-Morava” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.