Gur Language Research Articles

Dagbani tongue-root harmony: triggers, targets and blockers

This paper describes advanced tongue-root [ATR] harmony in Dagbani, a Gur language of Ghana, focusing on three distinct segments: triggers, targets, and blockers of [+ATR] harmony. Dagbani has a bidirectional [ATR] harmony, with [+ATR] as the dominant value. A root [i] triggers a left-to-right harmony targeting vowels in suffixes and clitics while the mid vowels [e, o] trigger a right-to-left direction of harmony targeting root vowels. There are two restrictions on harmony. First, a height similarity condition restricts harmony to a trigger and target that are both [+high] or [−high]. Second, a class of opaque consonants [l, ɾ, s] block the spread of [+ATR] between /i/ and an eligible vowel target. However, the opacity is unidirectional as the coronals do not block a right-to-left harmony. The paper addresses the controversy on whether such opacity effects exist in harmony patterns and discusses other issues of general theoretical interest in harmony patterns, such as parasitic harmony and the position of low vowels in [ATR] harmony.

Nasal Vowel Patterns in West Africa

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2013) Nicholas Rolle UC Berkeley “Nasal vowel patterns in West Africa” 1 n.rolle@berkeley.edu 1. I NTRODUCTION Nasal vowels are a common feature of West African phonologies, and have received a significant amount of attention concerning their (suprasegmental) representation, their interaction with nasal consonants, and their phonetic realization. Numerous authors have presented surveys of varying degrees of (targeted) depth which address the distribution of contrastive nasal vowels in (West) Africa, including Hyman (1972), Williamson (1973), Ruhlen (1978), Maddieson (1984, 2007), Clements (2000), Clements & Rialland (2006), and Hajek (2011). Building on this literature, this present study provides a more extensive survey on contrastive nasal vowels in West Africa, and specifically studies the types of systematic gaps found. For example, the language Togo-Remnant language Bowili has a 7 oral vowel inventory canonical of West Africa /i e ɛ a ɔ o u/, as well as a full set of nasal counterparts /ĩ ẽ ɛ a ɔ o ũ/ (Williamson 1973). In contrast, the Gur language Bariba has the same 7 oral vowel inventory, though a more limited nasal set /ĩ ɛ a ɔ ũ/, missing mid-high vowels */ẽ o/ (Hyman 1972:201). Using this as a starting point, this paper addresses the following questions: What are the recurring patterns one finds in West African nasal vowel systems and inventories? o What restrictions are there on mid vowels in the nasal inventory? In which families/areal zones do we find these patterns? To which factors can we attribute these patterns? o Genetic – Vertical inheritance o Areal – Horizontal spread o Universal Phonetic – Parallel Developments How do these patterns manifest in the phonologies of these languages o E.g. Restrictions of (co-)occurrences Are these patterns anomalous or expected when viewed in a cross-linguistic perspective? This paper presents a survey of 168 languages and language clusters, incorporating previous studies on nasal vowels cross-linguistically, and nasal vowels in (West) Africa. This study finds that nasality is pervasive across the region, and does not align well with genetic classification. Both the presence and absence of contrastive nasal vowels is shown in Atlantic groups, Gur groups, Mande, Kru, Kwa/Gbe groups, and Benue-Congo groups, including Igboid, Defoid, Edoid, Plateau/Kainji, Nupoid, Cross River, etc. This strongly suggests [1] areal spread introducing/initiating contrastive nasal vowels or nasal loss, [2] independent innovation/loss of contrastive nasal vowels, or [3] both. In addition, this present survey is unique in coding for the presence/absence of high-mid nasal vowels /ẽ o/, which have been described by many authors as rare in West Africa. This This paper is a working draft stemming from a large-scale project on nasal vowels cross-linguistically. Initial thanks to Larry Hyman, Matt Faytak, Florian Lionnet, Lev Michael, Zachary O'Hagan, Roger Blench, Stuart McGill, and Otelemate Harry. All comments very much welcome!

The subclassification of Songhay and its historical implications

This paper seeks to establish the first cladistic subgrouping of Songhay explicitly based on shared arbitrary innovations, a prerequisite both for distinguishing recent loans from valid extra-Songhay comparanda and for determining how Songhay spread. The results indicate that the Northern Songhay languages of the Sahara form a valid subfamily, even though no known historical records link Tabelbala to the others, and that Northern Songhay and Western Songhay (spoken around Timbuktu and Djenné) together form a valid subfamily, Northwestern Songhay. The speakers of Proto-Northern Songhay practised cultivation and permanent architecture, but were unfamiliar with date palms. Proto-Northwestern Songhay was already in contact with Berber and probably (perhaps indirectly) with Arabic, and was spoken along the Niger River. Proto-Songhay itself appears likely to have been in contact with Gur languages, confirming its relatively southerly location. This result is compatible with two scenarios for the northerly spread of Songhay. On Hypothesis A, Northern Songhay spread out from an oasis north-east of Gao, probably Tadmakkat or Takedda, and Northwestern Songhay had been spoken in areas west of Gao which now speak Eastern Songhay. On Hypothesis B, Northern Songhay spread out from the Timbuktu region, and Western Songhay derives from heavy “de-creolising” influence by Eastern Songhay on an originally Northern Songhay language. To choose between these hypotheses, further fieldwork will be required.

The Correlation between Aspect and Transitivity Alternation in Dagbani

This paper attempts to describe and analyze the relation between aspect and transitivity in Dagbani, a Gur language spoken in the Northern Region of Ghana by the Dagbamba. The author does this by focusing on the fact that there are different (perfective and imperfective) aspectual markers that correlate with the presence or absence of NP objects or adjunct phrases, such as adverbs. I conclude that pronouncing any syntactic element after a Dagbani verbal phrase or otherwise is determined by the aspectual suffixes of that verbal phrase.In an attempt to find explanations to this transitivity alternations, I make two hypothesises; the incorporated pronouns hypothesis and the focus hypothesis. None of these however, seems to adequately address the problem and I leave the working out of this to future research. It is shown that the correlation between aspect and transitivity in Dagbani sounds (at least superficially), very similar to the so-called “conjoint/disjoint” or “short/long” verb phenomenon that is found in a number of Bantu languages.

The pragmatics of reduplication: Implications for translating

One area that cannot be overlooked when it comes to translating from a foreign language into an African language is its morphology. In this paper, we discuss one of the most pervasive morphological phenomena in African languages – reduplication. The article seeks to examine which structures in English are translatable as reduplicates in Dagaare, a Gur language of West Africa. It is an attempt at departing from the conventional morphosyntactic perspective to a pragmatic/translation perspective. Basically, we consider reduplication as a morphological process with certain grammatical functions such as plurarity, intensification, iteration and augmentation. As instances of reduplication from actual translations into Dagaare from English are examined, attention will be paid to a possible difference between uses of reduplication that have become grammaticalised so that the meaning is not modified in context; and uses which may be said to convey some general procedural information to be developed further by means of inferential processing, for instance, some heightened value of some quality or quantity or event referred to. The analysis will be done within the framework of Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory of communication. It is hoped this research will help shed more light on this interestingly pervasive but inadequately researched area of Pragmatics.

Object-sharing as Symmetric Sharing: predicate clefting and serial verbs in Dàgáárè

Dagaare (a Gur language) allows various patterns of predicate clefting together with object pied-piping. This article investigates interactions of Predicate Cleft Constructions (PCCs) and object-sharing Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) in Dagaare and argues that the object in object-sharing SVCs is symmetrically shared. Namely, we argue, building on Citko (2005), that it is an instance of Parallel Merge. Thus we present support for Baker’s (1989) insight of the Double-Headedness and against Collins’ (1997) VP-shell structure with a pro. This kind of empirical evidence is not available in other languages (cf. Baker 1989, Collins 1997 among others) and hence Dagaare provides a novel argument for a permissible structure of object-sharing SVCs and the availability of symmetric structure in UG.

The two Kabiye orthographies

Two orthographies have been developed for Kabiye, a Gur language spoken mainly in Togo. The first aim of this paper is to provide an accurate historical summary concerning their development, teasing out some of the sociolinguistic issues which led to their separate evolution. Following this, I present the results of a comparative analysis, based on a text sample. I demonstrate five major types of difference: level of representation (shallow or deep), degree of consistency, dialect choice, diacritical tone marking and word boundaries. For each of these I explain by what criteria each party arrived at its decisions. Locally, I hope that this analysis will contribute to well-informed choices should the Kabiye orthography ever be rectified in the future. But beyond this, the Kabiye experience will be of interest to anyone developing orthographies in other languages. With access to a varied stock of case studies such as this one, we will be in a better position to refine the existing principles of orthography development which can then be applied cross-linguistically.

Kabiye

Kabiye is a Gur (Voltaic) language that belongs to the Eastern Grusi (also Gurunsi) sub-branch of Central Gur, which in turn sub-branches from Gur that is part of the greater Niger-Congo language family (Naden 1989: 147). The number of native Kabiye speakers is estimated at 730,000, with approximately 700,000 speakers living in Togo, 30,000 in Benin, and a very small number in Ghana (Grimes 2000: 242). The original homeland of the Kabiye people is in Northeastern Togo, with the region of Kozah serving as the community's cultural center. From the early 20th century, however, the community began to spread southward and now encompasses locations in the central and southern parts of Togo, as well as in the neighboring countries (Ali-Napo 1997: 20).

The syntax of nominalized complex verbal predicates in Dagaare

Abstract. Nominalization and verb serialization are widely attested phenomena in the generative linguistic literature, but an in‐depth study of their interaction remains to be undertaken. Based on data from Dagaare, a Gur language of West Africa, this paper analyzes a type of complex predicate construction, nominalized serial verbs, in which only one of the verbs carries a nominalization affix. With this, a number of issues about the nature of complex predicatehood, syntactic alternations, and lexical categorial differences involving nouns and verbs across languages are addressed. The paper proposes that, basically, serial verb nominalizations are VPs headed by a NomP functional projection.

What is a noun? What is an adjective? Problems of classification in Dagbani

It is widely acknowledged that all languages have a class of adjectives that can be formally or functionally distinguished from other word classes. This article deals with the differences between nouns and adjectives in Dagbani, a Gur language spoken in Ghana. Remarkably, a three-way distinction is required in order to account for the different types. Specifically, Dagbani appears to have two classes whose members can take the functions typically assigned to adjectives. Their major role is to modify a noun, whereas nouns themselves cannot modify each other. The distinction between nouns and adjectives and between the two types of adjectives is based on morphological and syntactic factors: while Type A adjectives behave exactly like canonical nouns from a morphological point of view, Type B resemble loans in that they lack any kind of morphological complexity. However, on the syntactic level, Type B words are more similar to nouns than Type A are. This article investigates the relation between the three different word types and aims at an account of their classification.

Les tons du dagara

Dagara – involving three varieties : Wule, Lobr and Bιrfυɔr – is a voltaic language in which a number of linguistic phenomena found are not generalisable to the whole group of Gur Languages. Falling within the scope of phonology, this article has for its purpose to show the contribution of this language to General Linguistics by presenting some important features of use to the typologists. The article first concerns itself with the fact that the tone bearer in Dagara is not the syllable as suggested by the functionalist or the structuralo-functionalist view generally adopted within African Languages analysis, but the morpheme : each morpheme bears one tone. Secondly, we will prove that, contrary to the whole voltaic group, the Dagara language involves contrast between opaque and transparent consonants which occurs also in Kwa, Kru, Tchadic or Bantu groups and, beyond the African continent, in Southeast Asian languages groups as well. Lastly, we will show, concerning the internal low floating tones and the opaque consonants, that even if there is no synchronic evidence of link between them, they both involve the same syntactic implication, that is, they both prevent a preceding high tone from spreading.

A comparative study of the semantics of serial verb constructions in Dagaare and Cantonese

The serial verb construction (SVC) is a productive syntactic phenomenon in many Asian and African languages and has been the subject of various studies. Many of these studies are, however, mainly based on data from the individual Asian and African languages or language groups (e.g. Jayaseelan 1996 for Malayalam; Schiller 1991 for Khmer; Chang 1990 for Mandarin; Bodomo 1997, 1998 for Dagaare and Akan; and Awoyale 1988 for Yoruba). There is a near lack of comparative studies involving Asian and African languages with regards to SVCs. Given the wide variety of syntactic and semantic manifestations that are characteristic of SVCs, cross-linguistic studies are crucial in developing a clear universal typology of SVCs as a first step towards a universal account of their syntax and semantics. Based on Dagaare (a Gur language of West Africa) and Cantonese (a Yue dialect of Chinese), this paper proposes a semantic typology of SVCs including benefactive, causative (resultative), inceptive, instrumental, and deictic serialization.

Diphthongization in Konni: A Feature Geometry Account

In this paper, diphthongization in Konni (a Gur language of northern Ghana) is analyzed within a Feature Geometry framework, in particular, one using multiple occurrences of the [closed] feature to indicate vowel height. In Konni, the long mid vowels /ee oo ee??/ diphthongize to yield [ie, uo, Ia,?a]. It is shown that these facts of diphthongization are intimately tied to the ATR vowel harmony system, to the point that one rule added to those independently needed for vowel harmony is all that is necessary to account for diphthongization. This rule delinks the vocalic node of the second vowel slot. Comparison with approaches using coindexing, and other height features shows that the approach espoused here more adequately accounts for the facts.

Phonetic realisation of downstep in Bimoba

Few phonological phenomena have so captured the attention of theorists and continued to baffle them as the phenomenon of tonal downstep. Downstep is the lowering of the tonal register that sometimes occurs between adjacent, otherwise identical tones. It is cumulative, and successive occurrences of the phenomenon result in ever lower settings of the tonal register. The present work reports on an instrumental study of downstep in Bimoba, a Gur language spoken in the Northern Region of Ghana. So far as I am aware, the present work is the only description in existence of tone in Bimoba.Bimoba is a good candidate for a study of downstep, because it is a ‘three-tone’ language in which both Low tones (floating and non-floating) and Mid tones cause High tones to be downstepped. A number of phonological studies (based on auditory impressions only) of three-tone languages with downstep of High tone have claimed that the difference in pitch between a High and a following Mid is equivalent to that between a High and a following downstepped High. These include Supyire (Carlson 1983), Babanki (Hyman 1979), Moba (Russell 1986) and Kagoro (van de Kolk 1992). This issue is important to tone theorists because a number of proposals on the theory of downstep formally equate a downstepped High with one type of Mid tone. These include Clements (1983), Hyman (1986, 1993), Inkelas (1987) and Snider (1990). On the other hand, a number of other proposals account for downstep with phonetic implementation rules. These include Pierrehumbert (1980), Poser (1984), Beckman & Pierrehumbert (1986) and Pierrehumbert & Beckman (1988). ‘If register shift is indeed a rule of phonetic implementation, there is no reason, a priori, for the interval of register shift to be equivalent to that found between two phonemic tones’ (Snider 1990: 470). So far as I am aware, no instrumental study has ever addressed this issue. The present study therefore undertakes to help fill this lacuna, and concludes that in Bimoba a Mid tone is phonetically indistinguishable from a downstepped High tone in comparable environments.

A hierarchical study of neutralization in Kasem

The grammar of Kasem is being analysed in terms of a hierarchical model (cf. Halliday, 1961; Bendor-Samuel, 1963), the (ascending) levels of relevance to this paper being word, phrase, clause, string, and sentence. (The ‘string’ is the unit which functions in the sentence and consists of a tightly bound sequence of clauses, the non-initial clauses operating under extensive restrictions with respect to their structure. This type of syntactic unit appears to be characteristic of many Gur languages and is often referred to as a ‘series’ or ‘serial construction’. For a recent discussion in some detail of this unit, under the term ‘clause clusters’, see Pike, 1966: 55–78.) At the word level in this hierarchy, a system of categories can be set up to account for the form of every verb word, i.e. so that every verb word can be completely ‘parsed’ or described in terms of these categories. But one of the characteristic features of this system of categories is that there is extensive neutralization between the categories. The question, then, that this paper seeks to discuss is this: are the ambiguities inherent in the verb word resolved within the language as a whole? An answer is here presented which seeks to relate the resolution of the ambiguities to the different levels of the grammatical hierarchy, as set up.

Konkomba Nominal Classes

Opening ParagraphThree is, so far as I know, no published account of the nominal class system of the Gurma group of languages. This group, which belongs, in Delafosse's classification, to the Voltaic family and, according to Westermann and Bryan, to the Gur languages, was discussed by Bertho but he did not give an outline of the nominal class system. He says, ‘Les Kokombas ou Konkombas se disent originaires de la région située à l'Ouest de l'Oti. Il se donnent à eux-mêmes le nom de Kpakpamba. Leur dialecte à préfixes-suffixes tient le milieu entre le gourma et le bassari-tshamba, dialectes qui possèdent également les préfixes-suffixes.’ Nor does Westermann in his account of Akasele give a class system for that language.