Abstract
AbstractThis paper provides a typological survey of Mano, a Mande language of Guinea and Liberia. It sketches a linguistic portrait of Mano as a representative member of the Southern branch of the Mande family. The family features shared by Mano include S-Aux-O-V-X word order, the parallelism between nominal and verbal syntax, and the ubiquity of passive lability. The branch features include rich tonal morphology, the unstable character of nasal consonants, and rich pronominal paradigms, including auxiliaries that index the person and number of the subject. Some of the features presented here have not been sufficiently analyzed in the Mandeist literature, so it is unclear how unusual Mano is in comparison to other Mande languages in terms of the large class of inalienably possessed nouns, or the clause-level nominalization that may include another clause as its constituent. Finally, some properties are almost certainly specific to Mano, such as the dedicated tonal forms used in conditional clauses. This paper puts Mano in its typological context, elaborating on those features which are cross linguistically well attested versus those which are cross linguistically rare.
Highlights
Mano (Ethnologue language name: Maan, ISO code: mev, glottolog code: mann1248) has 390,000 speakers in Guinea and Liberia and is one of the several dozen languages spoken in these countries
Many of the cross-linguistically unusual properties of Mano verb phrasal syntax are related to its peculiar S–AUX–O–V–X word order (Section 5.1), which is typical of Mande, and its likely diachronic origin is in verbal nominalization, which makes the present-day expression of nominalization interesting
In Mano, as in Mandinka or in Tura, another Southern Mande language, quotative indexes are used as quotative predicators, which are defined as a predicative element “similar to quotative verbs that cannot be classified as full-fledged verbs in a given language” (Güldemann 2008b: 15)
Summary
Mano (Ethnologue language name: Maan, ISO code: mev, glottolog code: mann1248) has 390,000 speakers in Guinea and Liberia and is one of the several dozen languages spoken in these countries. The Western branch includes the Southwestern Mande group and in particular, the Kpelle language, with which Mano is in contact and shares many of its structural features. The analysis begins with an overview of the sociolinguistic situation, including the patterns of multilingualism and issues of language contact (Section 2). It proceeds with a sketch of Mano phonology with its typologically original features. These include the existence of labial-velar consonants, a syllabic nasal and the unstable phonologization status of nasal consonants (Section 3.1), as well as some.
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