Abstracts in English of DPhil and PhD Theses on Mauritania

Abstract

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 36, 3-4, 2011 © The Maghreb Review 2011 This publication is printed on longlife paper ABSTRACTS IN ENGLISH OF DPHIL AND PHD THESES ON MAURITANIA COMPILED AND EDITED BY MOHAMED BEN-MADANI NOTE These abstracts of theses in English, covering all fields of research on Mauritania, are published here for the benefit of interested scholars and students. The first list of this bibliographical work was published in The Maghreb Review, Vol. 24, 1-2, 1999. These abstracts of theses are now included here. Similar abstracts on other Maghrebi countries have already been published: Algeria (Vol. 27, 2-4, 2002, pp. 114-395, Libya, Vol. 23, 1-4, 1998, pp. 102-267, Morocco, Vol. 26, 2-4, 2001, pp. 146-474, and Tunisia, Vol. 24, 3-4, 1999, pp. 128-268). A fully up-to-date version of all these contributions, with an introduction, will be published in book form in 2012. No previous bibliographical work has covered all this material. A few of these theses have subsequently been published in book form. The abstracts are arranged in alphabetical order. There are two theses which I have been unable to see: Ba, Amadou Racine, The use of national languages in the school system of Mauritania, Educat.D, Columbia University Teachers College, 1978. Stewart, C.C., The role of Shaikh Sidiyya and the Qadiriyya in southern Mauritania: an historical interpretation, DPhil, University of Oxford, 1971. This thesis was published by Oxford University Press, under the title Islam and social order in Mauritania. A case study from the nineteenth century, 1973. 330 MOHAMED BEN-MADANI Abd-el-Moniem, H.A.A., A new recording of Mauritanian rock art, PhD, London, University College, 2005 A new recording of Mauritanian rock art is an attempt to utilize new methods and techniques for recording rock art in northwest Africa. This research aims to show the recorded work not as isolated figures but as groups of interrelated figures. According to the published and unpublished inventories of the Mauritanian rock art sites, the two studied sites, which have only engravings, have not been recorded before. They are situated in the Adrar plateau in the north-central part of the Mauritanian Sahara. In addition to the methods and techniques of recording rock art (e.g. tracing, rubbing and photography), the methodology used in this work includes a number of new aspects that seem to have been ignored or omitted in most previous work on the subject. This new recording aims to provide new clues that enable the researcher to carry out two basic interpretative analyses and gain a better understanding of the recorded engravings as an example of the rock art of Mauritania. Adiop, Abdul Aziz Maalik, Aspects of Pulaar non-linear phonology, PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1998 The language under study in this thesis is Pulaar, a dialect of Fula. Fula belongs to the West Atlantic language group of the Niger-Congo family (Greenberg 1960). It is spoken by an estimated 15 million to 17 million people from the Atlantic to the Sudan and into parts of Ethiopia (Crystal 1987 for figures, and Paradis 1986, 1993; Labouret 1952, Arnott 1970, etc ... for description/analysis of various dialects). Fula is referred to as (Haal) Pulaar (Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Mali, The Gambia), Fulfulde (Niger, Nigeria, Sudan), Toucouleur/Tukulor (Senegal), Fulacunda, Peulh, etc. The dialect studied in this thesis is spoken in (southern) Mauritania, more specifically in the Kayhaydi area. The purpose of the thesis is to study aspects of Pulaar phonology from a non-linear perspective. The thesis is divided into six chapters organized as follows. We begin with an introductory chapter in which we present certain crucial facts and general notions about Pulaar. We give the vowel as well as consonant inventory of the language and a general review of the morphology and syntax of Pulaar. Because many processes discussed in this dissertation make reference in one way or another to the syllable, Chapter 2 discusses the Pulaar syllable, using the moraic framework. In this chapter we present arguments in favour of syllable-internal structure in moraic phonology. Chapter 3 describes and analyses vowel deletion and vowel spreading with a view to...