Volume 37, Issue 1 -

In this paper, we propose a reassessment of Wolof noun morphology and morphosyntax. Wolof is usually said to possess a total of 10 noun classes (8 for the singular, 2 for the plural), marked today exclusively on agreement targets. We provide evidence that two more plural noun classes must be recognized, which have so far been misinterpreted as “collective” rather than plural: the evidence we provide is morphosyntactic (from verb agreement) as well as morphological (from class-related asymmetries in the paradigm of the indefinite article). As for method, the main thrust of the paper consists in showing that an accurate analysis of the Wolof data must make use of the three distinct notions “noun class”, “inflectional class” and “agreement class” (or gender). Under the analysis defended here, Wolof turns out to have a fairly complex gender system, featuring 17 distinct gender values. Our analysis – and especially the discussion of Wolof so-called “collectives” – also bears on the general theoretical issue of how to establish the values of the number category.

Previous researchers differ on what the feature specifications of Dagbani vowels are, what the vowel inventory is, which vowels are contrastive and how phonological processes affect the surface realisation of Dagbani vowels. This study provides experimental results on Dagbani vowel features from acoustic and perceptual psycholinguistic inquiries with the goal of better defining the vowel features and inventory. Basic formant frequencies of the vowels in different phonological contexts support the view that (1) vowels of all height specifications (including /a/) have [ATR] variants; (2) /i/ and /ɨ/ neutralise in harmonic contexts; and (3) mid vowels surface as low in non-final positions. Results of a perceptual psycholinguistic investigation of the neutralisation between mid and low vowels also show that in certain contexts, speakers are unable to perceive any distinction between different words with these vowels. The paper discusses the implications of these results on the Dagbani vowel inventory, evaluating the merits of different possible approaches in the process.

Avatime is a Kwa language spoken in Ghana. This paper is based on a chapter of my PhD thesis (van Putten 2014). I would like to thank my thesis supervisors Felix Ameka, Nick Enfield, Dejan Matić and Robert D. Van Valin, jr., as well as Rebecca Defina, Julia Baranova and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on previous versions of this paper. I would also like to thank the audiences at ISSLaC 2013, LAG conference 2013 and CALL 2014 where previous versions of this paper were presented. Finally, I am very grateful to all the members of the Avatime community who have helped me in various ways, most importantly Mathias Mahunu, Samuel Oboni and Charlotte Bakudie. It has a focus construction in which the focused element is placed in clause-initial position and marked with an extra-high tone. In this paper I discuss the functions of this focus construction, mostly based on a corpus of spontaneous discourse. The focus construction can mark focus on subjects, objects, adjuncts and verbs. Focus marking is usually interpreted as narrow focus on the focus-marked element, but the focus may be wider. Focus marking is not obligatory. In answers to questions, it is rarely used, except when the focused element is the subject. In other contexts, the focus construction is mostly used for contrastive purposes, indicating there are alternatives to the focused element or that the focused element is unexpected. These functions can be unified in the definition of focus marking as highlighting the common-ground update.

This paper presents a re-analysis of the tone of Kabiye nouns. It focuses on two tonal phenomena that have apparently not been reported elsewhere in Gur languages: root melodies associating to whole words and tonal overwriting. All singular suffixes are analyzed as being underlyingly toneless and receiving their surface tone by means of the root melody associating to the entire word, as though blind to the morpheme boundary. Association of tones to trimoraic words is dealt with by positing that the OCP is inactive. The non-singular (plural, collective and liquid) suffixes – with one exception – are underlyingly HL. The analysis of these forms distinguishes between non-overwriting suffixes, in which the word level tone is merely the sum of its parts, and overwriting suffixes, in which the tone of the suffix overwrites the final tone(s) of the root melody.